---
title: A glacier is a huge mass of ice that slowly flows downhill under its… — Glaciers and ice ages · tree and pragmatics
description: A glacier is a huge mass of ice that slowly flows downhill under its own weight. Who acts: glacier, huge mass. A sentence of the lesson «Glaciers and ice ages» of the geography course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Glaciers and ice ages, sentence 8

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A glacier is a huge mass of ice that slowly flows downhill under its own weight.

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**Who acts:** glacier, huge mass · **What happens:** be, flow · **To what, where:** huge mass, own weight

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Glaciers and ice ages» 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 (glacier, huge mass), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:geography:054-glaciers-and-ice-ages.lesson:8
# text = A glacier is a huge mass of ice that slowly flows downhill under its own weight.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = geography
# lesson = 054-glaciers-and-ice-ages.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	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	glacier	glacier	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
3	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	huge	huge	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	mass	mass	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
7	of	of	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	ice	ice	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
9	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	11	nsubj	_	_
10	slowly	slowly	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
11	flows	flow	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	acl:relcl	_	_
12	downhill	downhill	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
13	under	under	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
14	its	its	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	16	nmod:poss	_	_
15	own	own	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	16	amod	_	_
16	weight	weight	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obl	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | a glacier | a huge mass |  |  |  | of ice | tree rules |
| 2 | **flow** | present | a huge mass |  |  | glacier's own weight |  | downhill, slowly *property* | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme under weight=Location |

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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:054-glaciers-and-ice-ages.lesson:8`.

**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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