---
title: Each city had a ziggurat, a huge stepped tower of mud brick with a t… — Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing · tree and pragmatics
description: Each city had a ziggurat, a huge stepped tower of mud brick with a temple on top for the city's god. Who acts: city. 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 16

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Each city had a ziggurat, a huge stepped tower of mud brick with a temple on top for the city's god.

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**Who acts:** city · **What happens:** have, step · **To what, where:** ziggurat

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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 (city), 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:16
# text = Each city had a ziggurat, a huge stepped tower of mud brick with a temple on top for the city's god.
# 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): no change
1	Each	each	DET	DT	PronType=Tot	2	det	_	_
2	city	city	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
5	ziggurat	ziggurat	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
8	huge	huge	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
9	stepped	step	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	10	amod	_	_
10	tower	tower	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	appos	_	_
11	of	of	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
12	mud	mud	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	compound	_	_
13	brick	brick	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nmod	_	_
14	with	with	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
15	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
16	temple	temple	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	nmod	_	_
17	on	on	ADP	IN	_	18	case	_	_
18	top	top	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	nmod	_	_
19	for	for	ADP	IN	_	23	case	_	_
20	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	21	det	_	_
21	city	city	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	23	nmod:poss	_	_
22	's	's	PART	POS	_	21	case	_	_
23	god	god	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	nmod	_	_
24	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	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 | **have** | past | each city | a ziggurat |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent ziggurat=Patient |
| 2 | **step** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn run-51.3.2 «NP V»: agent=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:history:003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.lesson:16`.

**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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