---
title: Farmers dug canals to carry river water to their fields, which is ca… — Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing · tree and pragmatics
description: Farmers dug canals to carry river water to their fields, which is called irrigation. Who acts: Farmers. A sentence of the lesson «Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing» of the history course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing, sentence 11

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Farmers dug canals to carry river water to their fields, which is called irrigation.

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**Who acts:** Farmers · **What happens:** dig, carry, call · **To what, where:** canals, river water, fields · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing» of the history 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 (Farmers), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:history:003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.lesson:11
# text = Farmers dug canals to carry river water to their fields, which is called irrigation.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = history
# lesson = 003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.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
1	Farmers	farmer	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	dug	dig	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	canals	canal	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
4	to	to	PART	TO	_	5	mark	_	_
5	carry	carry	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	2	advcl	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=3:acl
6	river	river	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	compound	_	_
7	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	_
8	to	to	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	10	nmod:poss	_	_
10	fields	field	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	obl	_	_
11	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	14	punct	_	_
12	which	which	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	14	nsubj:pass	_	_
13	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	14	aux:pass	_	_
14	called	call	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	10	acl	_	_
15	irrigation	irrigation	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	xcomp	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- 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 | **dig** | past | Farmers | canals |  |  |  |  | vn poke-19-1-1-1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent canal=Theme |
| 2 | **carry** | to-infinitive | Farmers *not said here* | river water |  | farmers's fields |  |  | vn carry-11.4 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent water=Theme to field=Destination |
| 3 | **call** | present · passive |  | farmers's fields |  |  |  |  | vn initiate\_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: subject=Recipient |

<!-- .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:history:003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.lesson:11`.

**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. **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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