---
title: A road looks like a flat black strip, but it is really a layer cake. — Roads and road signs · tree and pragmatics
description: A road looks like a flat black strip, but it is really a layer cake. Who acts: road. A sentence of the lesson «Roads and road signs» of the technology course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Roads and road signs, sentence 0

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
A road looks like a flat black strip, but it is really a layer cake.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** road · **What happens:** look, be · **To what, where:** layer cake

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Roads and road signs» of the technology 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 (road), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:technology:031-roads-and-road-signs.lesson:0
# text = A road looks like a flat black strip, but it is really a layer cake.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = technology
# lesson = 031-roads-and-road-signs.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	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	road	road	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	nsubj	_	_
3	looks	look	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	like	like	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
6	flat	flat	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
7	black	black	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	strip	strip	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obl	_	_
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	16	punct	_	_
10	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	_
11	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	16	nsubj	_	_
12	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	16	cop	_	_
13	really	really	ADV	RB	_	16	advmod	_	_
14	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
15	layer	layer	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	16	compound	_	_
16	cake	cake	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	conj	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	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 | **look** | present | a road |  |  |  |  | like a flat black strip | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus |
| 2 | **is a** | present | road | a layer cake |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

<!-- .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:technology:031-roads-and-road-signs.lesson:0`.

**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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- ← previous: [Bridges and skyscrapers, 23](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/30-bridges-and-skyscrapers/23/)
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