---
title: It can take hundreds to a thousand years to form just a few centimet… — Soil · tree and pragmatics
description: It can take hundreds to a thousand years to form just a few centimetres of soil. Who acts: It. A sentence of the lesson «Soil» of the geography course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Soil, sentence 8

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It can take hundreds to a thousand years to form just a few centimetres of soil.

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**Who acts:** It · **What happens:** take, form · **To what, where:** hundreds, few centimetres

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soil» 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 (It), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:geography:056-soil.lesson:8
# text = It can take hundreds to a thousand years to form just a few centimetres of soil.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = geography
# lesson = 056-soil.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): R5-strong ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	3	nsubj	_	_
2	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	3	aux	_	_
3	take	take	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
4	hundreds	hundred	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obj	_	_
5	to	to	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=8:det
7	thousand	thousand	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	8	nummod	_	_
8	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obl	_	_
9	to	to	PART	TO	_	10	mark	_	_
10	form	form	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	csubj	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=3:advcl
11	just	just	ADV	RB	_	14	advmod	_	_
12	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
13	few	few	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	_
14	centimetres	centimetre	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	obj	_	_
15	of	of	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
16	soil	soil	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	nmod	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **take** | can | It | hundreds |  |  | year |  | vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent hundred=Theme |
| 2 | **form** | to-infinitive |  | a few centimetres of soil |  |  |  |  | vn appear-48.1.1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location centimetre=Theme |

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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:056-soil.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): R5-strong ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1. **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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