Soft words for hard things: death and dying, illness and the body, sentence 3

Euphemisms also soften illness: people say they are "under the weather" instead of "ill", and older people said "the big C" because they were afraid even to say "cancer".

Who acts: Euphemisms, people, older people · What happens: soften, say, be · To what, where: illness, weather, big C, cancer · Speech: someone speaks here

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 (Euphemisms, people, older people), 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	Euphemisms	euphemism	NOUN	Number=Plur	3 soften	nsubj
2	also	also	ADV	_	3 soften	advmod
3	soften	soften	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	illness	illness	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 soften	obj
5	:	:	PUNCT	_	7 say	punct
6	people	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	7 say	nsubj
7	say	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	3 soften	parataxis
8	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 ill	nsubj
9	are	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	18 ill	cop
10	"	"	PUNCT	_	13 weather	punct
11	under	under	ADP	_	13 weather	case
12	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	13 weather	det
13	weather	weather	NOUN	Number=Sing	18 ill	obl
14	"	"	PUNCT	_	13 weather	punct
15	instead	instead	ADV	_	18 ill	advmod
16	of	of	ADP	_	18 ill	case
17	"	"	PUNCT	_	18 ill	punct
18	ill	ill	ADJ	Degree=Pos	7 say	ccomp
19	"	"	PUNCT	_	18 ill	punct
20	,	,	PUNCT	_	24 said	punct
21	and	and	CCONJ	_	24 said	cc
22	older	old	ADJ	Degree=Cmp	23 people	amod
23	people	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	24 said	nsubj
24	said	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	7 say	conj
25	"	"	PUNCT	_	28 C	punct
26	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	28 C	det
27	big	big	ADJ	Degree=Pos	28 C	amod
28	C	c	NOUN	Number=Sing	24 said	obj
29	"	"	PUNCT	_	28 C	punct
30	because	because	SCONJ	_	33 afraid	mark
31	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	33 afraid	nsubj
32	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	33 afraid	cop
33	afraid	afraid	ADJ	Degree=Pos	24 said	advcl
34	even	even	ADV	_	36 say	advmod
35	to	to	PART	_	36 say	mark
36	say	say	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	33 afraid	xcomp
37	"	"	PUNCT	_	38 cancer	punct
38	cancer	cancer	NOUN	Number=Sing	36 say	obj
39	"	"	PUNCT	_	38 cancer	punct
40	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 soften	punct

Pragmatics

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

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	soften	present	Euphemisms	illness			vn other_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent illness=Patient
2	say speech: assert	present	people				vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent
3	is in a quote	present	Euphemisms = euphemism		the weather	ill, instead property	tree rules
4	say speech: assert	past	older people	the big C			vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent c=Topic
5	is	past	Euphemisms = euphemism			afraid property	tree rules
6	say speech: assert	to-infinitive	Euphemisms = euphemism not said here	cancer			vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent cancer=Topic

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:3.

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): R6-punct-agree ×2, 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/3-death-and-feeling-poorly/3/