---
title: Why do Brazilians speak Portuguese while their neighbours speak Span… — Latin America and the Caribbean · tree and pragmatics
description: Why do Brazilians speak Portuguese while their neighbours speak Spanish? Who acts: Brazilians, neighbours. A sentence of the lesson «Latin America and the Caribbean» of the geography course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Latin America and the Caribbean, sentence 1

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Why do Brazilians speak Portuguese while their neighbours speak Spanish?

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**Who acts:** Brazilians, neighbours · **What happens:** speak · **To what, where:** Portuguese, Spanish · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Latin America and the Caribbean» of the geography course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Brazilians, neighbours), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:geography:014-latin-america-and-the-caribbean.lesson:1
# text = Why do Brazilians speak Portuguese while their neighbours speak Spanish?
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = geography
# lesson = 014-latin-america-and-the-caribbean.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R8-pos-agree ×2
1	Why	why	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	4	advmod	_	_
2	do	do	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
3	Brazilians	brazilian	PROPN	NNPS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
4	speak	speak	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=0:root|HaikuPos=VERB:VBP:Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin
5	Portuguese	Portuguese	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=4:obj|HaikuPos=NOUN:NN:Number=Sing
6	while	while	SCONJ	IN	_	9	mark	_	_
7	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	8	nmod:poss	_	_
8	neighbours	neighbour	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	nsubj	_	_
9	speak	speak	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	4	advcl	_	_
10	Spanish	Spanish	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	_
11	?	?	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **speak** *speech: other* | present · do-support | Brazilians | Portuguese |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **speak** *speech: other* | present | Brazilians's neighbours | Spanish |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)**, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, `mova-school-agreed-en.conllu`) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence `school:geography:014-latin-america-and-the-caribbean.lesson:1`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R8-pos-agree ×2. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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