---
title: The land was dry, so farmers dug canals to bring river water to thei… — Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing · tree and pragmatics
description: The land was dry, so farmers dug canals to bring river water to their fields. Who acts: land, 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 2

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The land was dry, so farmers dug canals to bring river water to their fields.

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**Who acts:** land, farmers · **What happens:** be, dig, bring · **To what, where:** canals, river water, fields

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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 (land, 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:2
# text = The land was dry, so farmers dug canals to bring river water to their fields.
# 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): R7-rel-agree ×1
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	land	land	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nsubj	_	_
3	was	be	AUX	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	cop	_	_
4	dry	dry	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	0	root	_	_
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
6	so	so	ADV	RB	_	8	advmod	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=8:cc|HaikuPos=CCONJ:CC:_
7	farmers	farmer	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	nsubj	_	_
8	dug	dig	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	conj	_	_
9	canals	canal	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obj	_	_
10	to	to	PART	TO	_	11	mark	_	_
11	bring	bring	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	advcl	_	_
12	river	river	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	compound	_	_
13	water	water	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	_
14	to	to	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
15	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	16	nmod:poss	_	_
16	fields	field	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	obl	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	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 | **is** | past | the land |  |  |  |  | dry *property* | tree rules |
| 2 | **dig** | past | farmers | canals |  |  |  |  | vn poke-19-1-1-1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent canal=Theme |
| 3 | **bring** | to-infinitive | farmers *not said here* | river water |  | farmers's fields |  |  | vn bring-11.3-1 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent water=Theme to field=Destination |

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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:2`.

**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): 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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