---
title: Decomposers break down dead plants and animals and return minerals t… — Food chains and food webs · tree and pragmatics
description: Decomposers break down dead plants and animals and return minerals to the soil. Who acts: Decomposers. A sentence of the lesson «Food chains and food webs» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Food chains and food webs, sentence 11

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Decomposers break down dead plants and animals and return minerals to the soil.

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**Who acts:** Decomposers · **What happens:** break down, return · **To what, where:** dead plants, minerals, soil

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Food chains and food webs» of the world 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 (Decomposers), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:026-food-chains-and-webs.lesson:11
# text = Decomposers break down dead plants and animals and return minerals to the soil.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 026-food-chains-and-webs.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): R8-pos-agree ×1
1	Decomposers	decomposer	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	break	break	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	down	down	ADP	RP	_	2	compound:prt	_	_
4	dead	dead	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	amod	_	_
5	plants	plant	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
6	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
7	animals	animal	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	conj	_	_
8	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
9	return	return	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=2:conj|HaikuPos=VERB:VB:VerbForm=Inf
10	minerals	mineral	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	obj	_	_
11	to	to	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
12	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	soil	soil	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obl	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **break down** | present | Decomposers | dead plants and animals |  |  |  |  | vn break-45.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent plant=Patient |
| 2 | **return** | present | Decomposers *not said here* | minerals |  | the soil |  |  | vn send-11.1 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent mineral=Theme to soil=Destination |

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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:world:026-food-chains-and-webs.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): R8-pos-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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- ← previous: [Food chains and food webs, 10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/world/26-food-chains-and-webs/10/)
- next →: [Food chains and food webs, 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/world/26-food-chains-and-webs/12/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/world/26-food-chains-and-webs/)