---
title: For billions of years life was only microbes. — Deep time and the story of life · tree and pragmatics
description: For billions of years life was only microbes. Who acts: life. 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 5

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
For billions of years life was only microbes.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** life · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** microbes

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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 (life), 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:5
# text = For billions of years life was only microbes.
# 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	For	for	ADP	IN	_	2	case	_	_
2	billions	billion	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obl	_	_
3	of	of	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nmod	_	_
5	life	life	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	_
6	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	8	cop	_	_
7	only	only	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	_
8	microbes	microbe	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	0	root	_	_
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | past | life | microbes |  |  |  | for billions of years | tree rules |

<!-- .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:5`.

**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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