Soft words for hard things: death and dying, illness and the body, sentence 10
"On his last legs" means close to dying or worn out; a car or a sofa can also be on its last legs.
Who acts: car · What happens: mean, die, wear out, be · To what, where: last legs
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: death and dying, illness and the body» 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 (car), 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 | _ | 7 means | punct |
| 2 | On | on | ADP | _ | 5 legs | case |
| 3 | his | his | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 5 legs | nmod:poss |
| 4 | last | last | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 5 legs | amod |
| 5 | legs | leg | NOUN | Number=Plur | 7 means | obl |
| 6 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 legs | punct |
| 7 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 8 | close | close | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 7 means | xcomp |
| 9 | to | to | SCONJ | _ | 10 dying | mark |
| 10 | dying | die | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 8 close | advcl |
| 11 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 12 worn | cc |
| 12 | worn | wear | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 10 dying | conj |
| 13 | out | out | ADP | _ | 12 worn | compound:prt |
| 14 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 7 means | punct |
| 15 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 16 car | det |
| 16 | car | car | NOUN | Number=Sing | 26 legs | nsubj |
| 17 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 19 sofa | cc |
| 18 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 19 sofa | det |
| 19 | sofa | sofa | NOUN | Number=Sing | 16 car | conj |
| 20 | can | can | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 26 legs | aux |
| 21 | also | also | ADV | _ | 26 legs | advmod |
| 22 | be | be | AUX | VerbForm=Inf | 26 legs | cop |
| 23 | on | on | ADP | _ | 26 legs | case |
| 24 | its | its | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 26 legs | nmod:poss |
| 25 | last | last | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 26 legs | amod |
| 26 | legs | leg | NOUN | Number=Plur | 7 means | parataxis |
| 27 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 7 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 | departed's last legs | close property | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent | ||||
| 2 | die | gerund | vn calibratable_cos-45.6.1 «NP.attribute V»: agent=Attribute | ||||||
| 3 | wear out | participle | vn wipe_manner-10.4.1-1 «NP V PP-Conative»: agent=Agent | ||||||
| 4 | is | can | a car or a sofa | sleep's last legs | tree rules |
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:003-death-and-feeling-poorly.lesson:10.
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): R1-cc-next ×1, R7-rel-agree ×3. 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/3-death-and-feeling-poorly/10/