Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and the police and lying and honesty, sentence 16
A "white lie" is a harmless lie told to spare someone's feelings.
Who acts: white lie, harmless lie · What happens: be, tell, spare · To what, where: harmless lie, feelings · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and the police and lying and honesty» 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 (white lie, harmless lie), 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 | 4 lie | det |
| 2 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 4 lie | punct |
| 3 | white | white | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 4 lie | amod |
| 4 | lie | lie | NOUN | Number=Sing | 9 lie | nsubj |
| 5 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 4 lie | punct |
| 6 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 9 lie | cop |
| 7 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 9 lie | det |
| 8 | harmless | harmless | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 9 lie | amod |
| 9 | lie | lie | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 told | nsubj |
| 10 | told | tell | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 11 | to | to | PART | _ | 12 spare | mark |
| 12 | spare | spare | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 10 told | xcomp |
| 13 | someone | someone | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Ind | 15 feelings | nmod:poss |
| 14 | 's | 's | PART | _ | 13 someone | case |
| 15 | feelings | feeling | NOUN | Number=Plur | 12 spare | obj |
| 16 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 9 lie | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | present | a white lie | a harmless lie | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | tell speech: assert | past | a harmless lie | vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V how S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | |||||
| 3 | spare not said to happen | to-infinitive | a harmless lie not said here | someone's feelings | vn bill-54.5 «NP V NP NP.asset»: agent=Agent feeling=Asset |
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:028-stealing-and-lying.lesson:16.
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, R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-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.
This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/28-stealing-and-lying/16/