---
title: The British quickly found a replacement: abandoning coffee, they beg… — Sri Lanka · tree and pragmatics
description: The British quickly found a replacement: abandoning coffee, they began cultivating tea instead. Who acts: British, disease. A sentence of Wikipedia's «Sri Lanka» with its dependency tree and pragmatics.
---

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# Sri Lanka, sentence 139

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From Wikipedia, [«Sri Lanka»](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lanka), 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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The British quickly found a replacement: abandoning coffee, they began cultivating tea instead.

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**Who acts:** British, disease · **What happens:** find, abandon, begin, cultivate · **To what, where:** replacement, coffee, tea

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This is a sentence of the English Wikipedia article «Sri Lanka». The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (British, disease), 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:Sri_Lanka:139
# text = The British quickly found a replacement: abandoning coffee, they began cultivating tea instead.
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	British	British	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	nsubj	_	_
3	quickly	quickly	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	_
4	found	find	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	replacement	replacement	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
7	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	8	punct	_	_
8	abandoning	abandon	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	4	advcl	_	_
9	coffee	coffee	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	obj	_	SpaceAfter=No
10	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
11	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
12	began	begin	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	4	conj	_	_
13	cultivating	cultivate	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	12	xcomp	_	_
14	tea	tea	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	obj	_	_
15	instead	instead	ADV	RB	_	13	advmod	_	SpaceAfter=No
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **find** | past | the British | a replacement |  |  |  | quickly *property* | vn discover-84 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent replacement=Topic |
| 2 | **abandon** | gerund | the British *not said here* | coffee |  |  |  |  | vn leave-51.2 «NP V NP.initial\_location»: agent=Theme coffee=Source |
| 3 | **begin** | past | disease |  |  |  |  |  | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V S\_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality |
| 4 | **cultivate** | gerund | disease *not said here* | tea |  |  |  | instead *property* | vn preparing-26.3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent tea=Product |

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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, «Sri Lanka», 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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