---
title: Over two hundred years, punishments in Britain slowly became less cr… — Gaols, magistrates and old punishments: from the… · tree and pragmatics
description: Over two hundred years, punishments in Britain slowly became less cruel. Who acts: punishments. A sentence of the lesson «Gaols, magistrates and old punishments: from the stocks to the Children Act of 1908» of the history course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of
---

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# Gaols, magistrates and old punishments: from the stocks to the Children Act of 1908, sentence 4

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Over two hundred years, punishments in Britain slowly became less cruel.

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**Who acts:** punishments · **What happens:** become

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Gaols, magistrates and old punishments: from the stocks to the Children Act of 1908» 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 (punishments), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:history:084-gaols-magistrates-and-old-punishments-from-the-stocks-to-the-children-act-of-1908.lesson:4
# text = Over two hundred years, punishments in Britain slowly became less cruel.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = history
# lesson = 084-gaols-magistrates-and-old-punishments-from-the-stocks-to-the-children-act-of-1908.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	Over	over	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
2	two	two	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	3	nummod	_	_
3	hundred	hundred	NUM	CD	NumForm=Word|NumType=Card	4	nummod	_	_
4	years	year	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	obl:unmarked	_	_
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	4	punct	_	_
6	punishments	punishment	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	10	nsubj	_	_
7	in	in	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
8	Britain	Britain	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
9	slowly	slowly	ADV	RB	_	10	advmod	_	_
10	became	become	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	less	less	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	12	advmod	_	_
12	cruel	cruel	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	xcomp	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	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 | **become** | past | punishments in Britain |  |  |  | year | cruel, slowly *property* | vn become-109.1-1-1 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=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.

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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:084-gaols-magistrates-and-old-punishments-from-the-stocks-to-the-children-act-of-1908.lesson:4`.

**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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