---
title: It is a lovely story, but real writing took thousands of years and m… — How writing began: from tally marks and pictures… · tree and pragmatics
description: It is a lovely story, but real writing took thousands of years and many peoples to grow. Who acts: It, real writing. A sentence of the lesson «How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet» of the history course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics 
---

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# How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet, sentence 1

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
It is a lovely story, but real writing took thousands of years and many peoples to grow.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** It, real writing · **What happens:** be, take, grow · **To what, where:** lovely story, thousands

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This is a sentence of the lesson «How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet» 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 (It, real writing), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:history:082-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet.lesson:1
# text = It is a lovely story, but real writing took thousands of years and many peoples to grow.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = history
# lesson = 082-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet.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	It	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	nsubj	_	_
2	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	5	cop	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	lovely	lovely	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	story	story	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
8	real	real	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	writing	writing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
10	took	take	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	5	conj	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=5:parataxis
11	thousands	thousand	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	obj	_	_
12	of	of	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
13	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	nmod	_	_
14	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	_
15	many	many	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	16	amod	_	_
16	peoples	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	conj	_	_
17	to	to	PART	TO	_	18	mark	_	_
18	grow	grow	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	16	acl	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	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 | **is a** | present | It | a lovely story |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **take** | past | real writing | thousands of years and many peoples |  |  |  |  | vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent thousand=Theme |
| 3 | **grow** | to-infinitive | real writing *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V»: 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:082-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet.lesson:1`.

**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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