---
title: Cities grew at useful spots: where a river could be bridged, where a… — Population and cities · tree and pragmatics
description: Cities grew at useful spots: where a river could be bridged, where a harbour was sheltered, where trade routes met. Who acts: Cities, trade routes. A sentence of the lesson «Population and cities» of the geography course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every c
---

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# Population and cities, sentence 4

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Cities grew at useful spots: where a river could be bridged, where a harbour was sheltered, where trade routes met.

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**Who acts:** Cities, trade routes · **What happens:** grow, bridge, shelter, meet · **To what, where:** useful spots, river, harbour

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Population and cities» 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 (Cities, trade routes), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:geography:024-population-and-cities.lesson:4
# text = Cities grew at useful spots: where a river could be bridged, where a harbour was sheltered, where trade routes met.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = geography
# lesson = 024-population-and-cities.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): no change
1	Cities	city	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	grew	grow	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	at	at	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
4	useful	useful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	spots	spot	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obl	_	_
6	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	2	punct	_	_
7	where	where	ADV	WRB	PronType=Rel	12	advmod	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	river	river	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj:pass	_	_
10	could	could	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
11	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	12	aux:pass	_	_
12	bridged	bridge	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	5	acl:relcl	_	_
13	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	18	punct	_	_
14	where	where	ADV	WRB	PronType=Rel	18	advmod	_	_
15	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
16	harbour	harbour	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	18	nsubj:pass	_	_
17	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	18	aux:pass	_	_
18	sheltered	shelter	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	12	conj	_	_
19	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	23	punct	_	_
20	where	where	ADV	WRB	PronType=Rel	23	advmod	_	_
21	trade	trade	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	22	compound	_	_
22	routes	route	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	23	nsubj	_	_
23	met	meet	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	12	conj	_	_
24	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
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 | **grow** | past | Cities |  |  | useful spots |  |  | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme at spot=Location |
| 2 | **bridge** | could · passive |  | a river |  |  |  |  | vn contiguous\_location-47.8 «NP V NP»: subject=Co-Theme |
| 3 | **shelter** | past · passive |  | a harbour |  |  |  |  | vn concealment-16 «NP V NP»: subject=Patient |
| 4 | **meet** | past | trade routes |  |  |  |  |  | vn meet-36.3-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .note -->
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:024-population-and-cities.lesson:4`.

**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): no change. **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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