---
title: By measuring how much of each is in a rock, scientists can work out… — Deep time and the story of life · tree and pragmatics
description: By measuring how much of each is in a rock, scientists can work out its age. Who acts: scientists. A sentence of the lesson «Deep time and the story of life» of the geography course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Deep time and the story of life, sentence 4

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By measuring how much of each is in a rock, scientists can work out its age.

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**Who acts:** scientists · **What happens:** measure, be, work out · **To what, where:** much, age

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Deep time and the story of life» 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 (scientists), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:geography:058-deep-time-and-the-story-of-life.lesson:4
# text = By measuring how much of each is in a rock, scientists can work out its age.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = geography
# lesson = 058-deep-time-and-the-story-of-life.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	By	by	SCONJ	IN	_	2	mark	_	_
2	measuring	measure	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	14	advcl	_	_
3	how	how	ADV	WRB	PronType=Int	4	advmod	_	_
4	much	much	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	obj	_	_
5	of	of	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
6	each	each	DET	DT	PronType=Tot	10	det	_	_
7	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	10	cop	_	_
8	in	in	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	rock	rock	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nmod	_	_
11	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	2	punct	_	_
12	scientists	scientist	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	nsubj	_	_
13	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	14	aux	_	_
14	work	work	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
15	out	out	ADP	RP	_	14	compound:prt	_	_
16	its	its	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	17	nmod:poss	_	_
17	age	age	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	obj	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	14	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 | **measure** | gerund | scientists *not said here* | much |  |  |  |  | vn register-54.1-2-1 «NP V NP.value»: agent=Theme much=Value |
| 2 | **is** | present |  |  |  |  |  | of each rock | tree rules |
| 3 | **work out** | can | scientists | rock's age |  |  |  |  | vn discover-84 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent age=Topic |

<!-- .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:058-deep-time-and-the-story-of-life.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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