---
title: More food meant bigger towns, and cities like Uruk had tens of thous… — Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing · tree and pragmatics
description: More food meant bigger towns, and cities like Uruk had tens of thousands of people. Who acts: More food. 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.
---

<!-- md -->
[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/3-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing/3/)

<!-- crumbs -->
[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / [Mesopotamia: the first cities and writ…](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/3-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing/) / 3

# Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing, sentence 3

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
More food meant bigger towns, and cities like Uruk had tens of thousands of people.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** More food · **What happens:** mean, have · **To what, where:** bigger towns, tens

<!-- .vabout -->
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 (More food), 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:3
# text = More food meant bigger towns, and cities like Uruk had tens of thousands of people.
# 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 ×2, R6-punct-agree ×1
1	More	more	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	2	amod	_	_
2	food	food	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	meant	mean	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	bigger	big	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	5	amod	_	_
5	towns	town	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obj	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	8	punct	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	cities	city	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	conj	_	_
9	like	like	SCONJ	IN	_	11	mark	_	_
10	Uruk	Uruk	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	nmod	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=11:nsubj
11	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=8:acl:relcl
12	tens	ten	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	obj	_	_
13	of	of	ADP	IN	_	14	case	_	_
14	thousands	thousand	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	nmod	_	_
15	of	of	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
16	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	nmod	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=2: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 | **mean** | past | More food | bigger towns and cities  Uruk |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent town=Topic |
| 2 | **have** | past | More food *not said here* | tens of thousands of people |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent ten=Patient |

<!-- .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.

<!-- div src -->

**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:3`.

**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 ×2, R6-punct-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/).

<!-- /div -->

<!-- pn -->
- ← previous: [Mesopotamia: the first cities and writ…, 2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/3-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing/2/)
- next →: [Mesopotamia: the first cities and writ…, 4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/3-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing/4/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/3-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing/)