Soft words for hard things: drinking and drugs and religion and fate, sentence 23
"The dickens", in exclamations like "what the dickens is that?", means the Devil, not the writer Charles Dickens.
Who acts: dickens · What happens: be, mean · To what, where: exclamations, Devil · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: drinking and drugs and religion and fate» 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 (dickens), 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 dickens | punct |
| 2 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 3 dickens | det |
| 3 | dickens | dickens | NOUN | Number=Sing | 18 means | nsubj |
| 4 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 dickens | punct |
| 5 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 7 exclamations | punct |
| 6 | in | in | ADP | _ | 7 exclamations | case |
| 7 | exclamations | exclamation | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 dickens | nmod |
| 8 | like | like | ADP | _ | 10 what | case |
| 9 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 10 what | punct |
| 10 | what | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 7 exclamations | acl |
| 11 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 12 dickens | det |
| 12 | dickens | dickens | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 what | nsubj |
| 13 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 10 what | cop |
| 14 | that | that | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Dem | 10 what | nsubj |
| 15 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 10 what | punct |
| 16 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 10 what | punct |
| 17 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 3 dickens | punct |
| 18 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 19 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 20 Devil | det |
| 20 | Devil | Devil | PROPN | Number=Sing | 18 means | obj |
| 21 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 24 writer | punct |
| 22 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 24 writer | advmod |
| 23 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 24 writer | det |
| 24 | writer | writer | NOUN | Number=Sing | 25 Charles | nmod:desc |
| 25 | Charles | Charles | PROPN | Number=Sing | 20 Devil | conj |
| 26 | Dickens | Dickens | PROPN | Number=Sing | 25 Charles | flat |
| 27 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 18 means | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is in a quote | present | the dickens | exclamations not said here | like the dickens in exclamations | tree rules | |||
| 2 | mean | present | the dickens in exclamations | the Devil and Charles the writer | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent devil=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:031-drinking-drugs-religion-fate.lesson:23.
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 ×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/31-drinking-drugs-religion-fate/23/