Soft words for hard things: politics and government spin, sentence 6
"Plausible deniability" means an arrangement that lets leaders deny they knew about something.
Who acts: Plausible deniability, arrangement, leaders · What happens: mean, let, deny, know · To what, where: arrangement, leaders
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: politics and government spin» of the euphemisms 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 (Plausible deniability, arrangement, leaders), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.
The tree
The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)
| # | word | lemma | UPOS | features | head | relation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 deniability | punct |
| 2 | Plausible | plausible | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 3 deniability | amod |
| 3 | deniability | deniability | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 means | nsubj |
| 4 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 deniability | punct |
| 5 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 6 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 7 arrangement | det |
| 7 | arrangement | arrangement | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 means | obj |
| 8 | that | that | PRON | PronType=Rel | 9 lets | nsubj |
| 9 | lets | let | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 7 arrangement | acl:relcl |
| 10 | leaders | leader | NOUN | Number=Plur | 9 lets | obj |
| 11 | deny | deny | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 9 lets | xcomp |
| 12 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 13 knew | nsubj |
| 13 | knew | know | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 deny | ccomp |
| 14 | about | about | ADP | _ | 15 something | case |
| 15 | something | something | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Ind | 13 knew | obl |
| 16 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 5 means | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | mean | present | Plausible deniability | a arrangement | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent arrangement=Topic | ||||
| 2 | let | present | a arrangement | leaders | tree rules | ||||
| 3 | deny | infinitive | leaders not said here | vn conjecture-29.5 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Theme | |||||
| 4 | know | past | leaders = leader | about something | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V PP.stimulus»: agent=Experiencer about something=Stimulus |
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.
Licence: CC 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:euphemisms:024-government-spin.lesson:6.
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.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/24-government-spin/6/