---
title: Some West Africans in slavery held on to their traditional Vodou bel… — Haiti · tree and pragmatics
description: Some West Africans in slavery held on to their traditional Vodou beliefs by secretly syncretizing it with Catholicism. Who acts: Africans. A sentence of Wikipedia's «Haiti» with its dependency tree and pragmatics.
---

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# Haiti, sentence 59

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From Wikipedia, [«Haiti»](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti), revision of the 2026-09-01 dump, [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). The trees and pragmatics of these pages, Mova's parse of that text, are CC BY-SA 4.0 too.

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Some West Africans in slavery held on to their traditional Vodou beliefs by secretly syncretizing it with Catholicism.

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**Who acts:** Africans · **What happens:** hold on, syncretize, believe · **To what, where:** slavery

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This is a sentence of the English Wikipedia article «Haiti». The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Africans), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

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**Mova's own parse.** This tree may be wrong. The article's note marks are left out of the parse.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = wikipedia:Haiti:59
# text = Some West Africans in slavery held on to their traditional Vodou beliefs by secretly syncretizing it with Catholicism.
1	Some	some	DET	DT	PronType=Ind	3	det	_	_
2	West	West	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	3	compound	_	_
3	Africans	African	PROPN	NNPS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
4	in	in	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
5	slavery	slavery	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
6	held	hold	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	5	acl	_	_
7	on	on	ADP	RP	_	6	compound:prt	_	_
8	to	to	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
9	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	12	nmod:poss	_	_
10	traditional	traditional	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	amod	_	_
11	Vodou	Vodou	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	12	compound	_	_
12	beliefs	belief	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obl	_	_
13	by	by	SCONJ	IN	_	15	mark	_	_
14	secretly	secretly	ADV	RB	_	15	advmod	_	_
15	syncretizing	syncretize	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	6	advcl	_	_
16	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	15	obj	_	_
17	with	with	ADP	IN	_	18	case	_	_
18	Catholicism	Catholicism	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	15	obl	_	SpaceAfter=No
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **hold on** | participle |  | slavery  some West Africans *not said here* |  |  |  | to Africans's traditional Vodou beliefs | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
| 2 | **syncretize** | gerund |  | slavery |  |  |  | with Catholicism; secretly *property* | tree rules |
| 4 | **believe** |  | Africans *= african* |  |  |  |  |  | nom belief «cognition transitive»: poss=agent |

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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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**Text:** the English Wikipedia, «Haiti», revision of the 2026-09-01 dump, CC BY-SA 4.0. **Tree:** Mova's own parse, CC BY-SA 4.0 as the text is. **Frames:** Mova's frames reader (`prag`), the article read in order, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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