Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness, sentence 10
"Not the sharpest tool in the shed" is a joke meaning not very clever.
Who acts: sharpest tool, joke · What happens: be, mean · To what, where: joke
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness» 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 (sharpest tool, joke), 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 | _ | 5 tool | punct |
| 2 | Not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 5 tool | advmod |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 tool | det |
| 4 | sharpest | sharp | ADJ | Degree=Sup | 5 tool | amod |
| 5 | tool | tool | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 joke | nsubj |
| 6 | in | in | ADP | _ | 8 shed | case |
| 7 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 shed | det |
| 8 | shed | shed | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 tool | nmod |
| 9 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 tool | punct |
| 10 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 12 joke | cop |
| 11 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 12 joke | det |
| 12 | joke | joke | NOUN | Number=Sing | root | root |
| 13 | meaning | mean | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 12 joke | acl |
| 14 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 16 clever | advmod |
| 15 | very | very | ADV | _ | 16 clever | advmod |
| 16 | clever | clever | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 13 meaning | xcomp |
| 17 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 12 joke | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | is a | present | the sharpest tool in the shed | a joke | tree rules | ||||
| 2 | mean | gerund | a joke not said here | clever property | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=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:035-mistakes-and-stupidity.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): no change. 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/35-mistakes-and-stupidity/10/