---
title: An apostrophe shows missing letters or belonging, never just a plural. — Plurals that make no sense: mice, sheep and geese · tree and pragmatics
description: An apostrophe shows missing letters or belonging, never just a plural. Who acts: apostrophe. A sentence of the lesson «Plurals that make no sense: mice, sheep and geese» of the language course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Plurals that make no sense: mice, sheep and geese, sentence 11

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An apostrophe shows missing letters or belonging, never just a plural.

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**Who acts:** apostrophe · **What happens:** show · **To what, where:** missing letters

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Plurals that make no sense: mice, sheep and geese» of the language 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 (apostrophe), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:language:010-plurals-mice-sheep-and-geese.lesson:11
# text = An apostrophe shows missing letters or belonging, never just a plural.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = language
# lesson = 010-plurals-mice-sheep-and-geese.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 ×1
1	An	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	apostrophe	apostrophe	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	shows	show	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	missing	missing	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	letters	letter	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	obj	_	_
6	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
7	belonging	belong	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	conj	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=3:conj|HaikuPos=VERB:VBG:VerbForm=Ger
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
9	never	never	ADV	RB	PronType=Neg	12	advmod	_	_
10	just	just	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
11	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	plural	plural	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	conj	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: changed act=assert

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **show** | present | a apostrophe | missing letters or belonging and a plural |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent letter=Recipient |

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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:language:010-plurals-mice-sheep-and-geese.lesson:11`.

**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 ×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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