Soft words for hard things: politics and government spin and war, the military and violence, sentence 1

A word like "neutralize" or "eliminate" sounds like tidying up, but in a soldier's or a spy's report it means to kill.

Who acts: word, soldier · What happens: neutralize, eliminate, sound, tidy up, mean, kill · To what, where: spy report

This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: politics and government spin and war, the military and violence» 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 (word, soldier), 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	A	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	2 word	det
2	word	word	NOUN	Number=Sing	11 sounds	nsubj
3	like	like	ADP	_	5 neutralize	case
4	"	"	PUNCT	_	5 neutralize	punct
5	neutralize	neutralize	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 word	nmod
6	"	"	PUNCT	_	5 neutralize	punct
7	or	or	CCONJ	_	11 sounds	cc
8	"	"	PUNCT	_	9 eliminate	punct
9	eliminate	eliminate	VERB	_	5 neutralize	conj
10	"	"	PUNCT	_	9 eliminate	punct
11	sounds	sound	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
12	like	like	SCONJ	_	13 tidying	mark
13	tidying	tidy	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	11 sounds	advcl
14	up	up	ADP	_	13 tidying	compound:prt
15	,	,	PUNCT	_	27 means	punct
16	but	but	CCONJ	_	27 means	cc
17	in	in	ADP	_	25 report	case
18	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	19 soldier	det
19	soldier	soldier	NOUN	Number=Sing	25 report	nmod:poss
20	's	's	PART	_	19 soldier	case
21	or	or	CCONJ	_	23 spy	cc
22	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	23 spy	det
23	spy	spy	NOUN	Number=Sing	25 report	compound
24	's	's	PART	_	23 spy	case
25	report	report	NOUN	Number=Sing	27 means	obl
26	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	27 means	nsubj
27	means	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	11 sounds	conj
28	to	to	PART	_	29 kill	mark
29	kill	kill	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	27 means	xcomp
30	.	.	PUNCT	_	11 sounds	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	where	roles by
1	neutralize in a quote	infinitive			vn other_cos-45.4 «NP.patient V»: agent=Patient
2	eliminate in a quote	infinitive			vn murder-42.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent
3	sound	present	a word		vn stimulus_subject-30.4 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Stimulus
4	tidy up	gerund	a word not said here		tree rules
5	mean	present	word	a soldier's spy report	vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
6	kill not said to happen	to-infinitive	word not said here		vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer
7	report		a soldier		nom report «communication transitive»: poss=agent

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:025-spin-war-and-violence.lesson:1.

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): R5-strong ×1, R7-rel-agree ×2. 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/25-spin-war-and-violence/1/