Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes, sentence 4
"Dropped the ball" (mostly US) means made a mistake or failed to do what was needed.
What happens: drop, mean, make, fail, not do, need · To what, where: ball, mistake · 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: 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 | _ | 2 Dropped | punct |
| 2 | Dropped | drop | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 10 means | csubj |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 4 ball | det |
| 4 | ball | ball | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 Dropped | obj |
| 5 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 2 Dropped | punct |
| 6 | ( | ( | PUNCT | _ | 8 US | punct |
| 7 | mostly | mostly | ADV | _ | 8 US | advmod |
| 8 | US | US | PROPN | Number=Sing | 2 Dropped | dep |
| 9 | ) | ) | PUNCT | _ | 8 US | punct |
| 10 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 11 | made | make | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 10 means | ccomp |
| 12 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 13 mistake | det |
| 13 | mistake | mistake | NOUN | Number=Sing | 11 made | obj |
| 14 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 15 failed | cc |
| 15 | failed | fail | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=1 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 11 made | conj |
| 16 | to | to | PART | _ | 17 do | mark |
| 17 | do | do | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 15 failed | xcomp |
| 18 | what | what | PRON | PronType=Int | 20 needed | obj |
| 19 | was | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 20 needed | aux:pass |
| 20 | needed | need | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 17 do | advcl |
| 21 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 10 means | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | drop in a quote | past | the ball | vn put_direction-9.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent ball=Theme | |||||
| 2 | mean | present | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | ||||||
| 3 | make | past | a mistake | vn build-26.1-1 «NP.asset V NP»: agent=Asset mistake=Product | |||||
| 4 | fail | past | vn succeed-74-3-1-1 «NP V S_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Eventuality | ||||||
| 5 | not do | to-infinitive | vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent | ||||||
| 6 | need | past · passive | vn want-32.1-1-1 «NP V NP ADV»: what=Theme |
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:4.
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/34-failure-and-mistakes/4/