---
title: People paid in grain, silver weighed on scales and cowrie shells. — Writing, laws and money: how strangers learned t… · tree and pragmatics
description: People paid in grain, silver weighed on scales and cowrie shells. Who acts: People. A sentence of the lesson «Writing, laws and money: how strangers learned to trust each other» of the history course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Writing, laws and money: how strangers learned to trust each other, sentence 8

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People paid in grain, silver weighed on scales and cowrie shells.

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**Who acts:** People · **What happens:** pay, weigh · **To what, where:** grain, silver, scales

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Writing, laws and money: how strangers learned to trust each other» 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 (People), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:history:063-writing-laws-and-money-how-strangers-learned-to-trust-each-other.lesson:8
# text = People paid in grain, silver weighed on scales and cowrie shells.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = history
# lesson = 063-writing-laws-and-money-how-strangers-learned-to-trust-each-other.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	People	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	paid	pay	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	in	in	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	grain	grain	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	_
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
6	silver	silver	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	conj	_	_
7	weighed	weigh	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	6	acl	_	_
8	on	on	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	scales	scale	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	obl	_	_
10	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
11	cowrie	cowrie	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	compound	_	_
12	shells	shell	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	conj	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **pay** | past | People |  |  | grain and silver |  |  | vn pay-68-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **weigh** | participle |  | silver *not said here* |  | scales and cowrie shells |  |  | vn register-54.1-2-1 «NP V NP.value»: agent=Theme |

<!-- .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:063-writing-laws-and-money-how-strangers-learned-to-trust-each-other.lesson:8`.

**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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- next →: [Writing, laws and money: how strangers…, 9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/63-writing-laws-and-money-how-strangers-learned-to-trust-each-other/9/)
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