Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes, sentence 2
Businesses and politicians spin failures: a company whose plan flopped calls its new plan "a pivot", and a minister who was caught out says "lessons have been learned".
Who acts: Businesses, plan, company, minister · What happens: spin, flop, call, catch out, say, learn · To what, where: failures, new plan, minister, lessons · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes» 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 (Businesses, plan, company, minister), 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 | Businesses | business | NOUN | Number=Plur | 4 spin | nsubj |
| 2 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 3 politicians | cc |
| 3 | politicians | politician | NOUN | Number=Plur | 1 Businesses | conj |
| 4 | spin | spin | VERB | Mood=Ind Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 5 | failures | failure | NOUN | Number=Plur | 4 spin | obj |
| 6 | : | : | PUNCT | _ | 8 company | punct |
| 7 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 8 company | det |
| 8 | company | company | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 calls | nsubj |
| 9 | whose | whose | PRON | Poss=Yes PronType=Rel | 10 plan | nmod:poss |
| 10 | plan | plan | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 flopped | nsubj |
| 11 | flopped | flop | VERB | Mood=Ind Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 8 company | acl:relcl |
| 12 | calls | call | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 4 spin | parataxis |
| 13 | its | its | PRON | Case=Gen Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs | 15 plan | nmod:poss |
| 14 | new | new | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 plan | amod |
| 15 | plan | plan | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 calls | obj |
| 16 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 18 pivot | punct |
| 17 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 18 pivot | det |
| 18 | pivot | pivot | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 calls | xcomp |
| 19 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 18 pivot | punct |
| 20 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 28 says | punct |
| 21 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 28 says | cc |
| 22 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 23 minister | det |
| 23 | minister | minister | NOUN | Number=Sing | 28 says | nsubj |
| 24 | who | who | PRON | PronType=Rel | 26 caught | nsubj:pass |
| 25 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 26 caught | aux:pass |
| 26 | caught | catch | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 23 minister | acl:relcl |
| 27 | out | out | ADP | _ | 26 caught | compound:prt |
| 28 | says | say | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 12 calls | conj |
| 29 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 33 learned | punct |
| 30 | lessons | lesson | NOUN | Number=Plur | 33 learned | nsubj:pass |
| 31 | have | have | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 33 learned | aux |
| 32 | been | be | AUX | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part | 33 learned | aux:pass |
| 33 | learned | learn | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 28 says | ccomp |
| 34 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 33 learned | punct |
| 35 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 4 spin | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | spin | present | Businesses and politicians | failures | vn roll-51.3.1 «NP V NP.theme»: agent=Agent failure=Theme | ||||
| 2 | flop | past | plan | vn assuming_position-50 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 3 | call | present | a company | plan's new plan | vn initiate_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent plan=Recipient | ||||
| 4 | catch out | past · passive | a minister | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: subject=Theme | |||||
| 5 | say speech: assert | present | a minister | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | |||||
| 6 | learn in a quote | present · perfect · passive | lessons | vn learn-14-2-1 «NP V NP»: subject=Topic | |||||
| 7 | plan | plan | nom plan «cognition 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:034-failure-and-mistakes.lesson:2.
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, R7-rel-agree ×2, R8-pos-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/34-failure-and-mistakes/2/