Soft words for hard things: stupidity and madness, sentence 11
"Not firing on all cylinders" means not thinking clearly, like an engine running badly; often said about someone tired or ill.
Who acts: engine · What happens: not fire, mean, not think, run, say · To what, where: cylinders · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: 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 (engine), 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 firing | punct |
| 2 | Not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 3 firing | advmod |
| 3 | firing | fire | VERB | Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part | 8 means | nsubj |
| 4 | on | on | ADP | _ | 6 cylinders | case |
| 5 | all | all | DET | PronType=Tot | 6 cylinders | det |
| 6 | cylinders | cylinder | NOUN | Number=Plur | 3 firing | obl |
| 7 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 3 firing | punct |
| 8 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 9 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 10 thinking | advmod |
| 10 | thinking | think | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 8 means | ccomp |
| 11 | clearly | clearly | ADV | _ | 10 thinking | advmod |
| 12 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 15 engine | punct |
| 13 | like | like | ADP | _ | 15 engine | case |
| 14 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 15 engine | det |
| 15 | engine | engine | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 thinking | obl |
| 16 | running | run | VERB | VerbForm=Ger | 15 engine | acl |
| 17 | badly | badly | ADV | Degree=Pos | 16 running | advmod |
| 18 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 20 said | punct |
| 19 | often | often | ADV | _ | 20 said | advmod |
| 20 | said | say | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 8 means | parataxis |
| 21 | about | about | ADP | _ | 22 someone | case |
| 22 | someone | someone | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Ind | 20 said | obl |
| 23 | tired | tired | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 22 someone | amod |
| 24 | or | or | CCONJ | _ | 25 ill | cc |
| 25 | ill | ill | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 23 tired | conj |
| 26 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 8 means | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not fire in a quote | gerund | all cylinders | vn throw-17.1-1 «NP V NP PP.destinations»: agent=Agent on cylinder=Destination | |||||
| 2 | mean | present | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | ||||||
| 3 | not think speech: other | gerund | like a engine; clearly property | vn focus-87.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent | |||||
| 4 | run | gerund | a engine not said here | badly property | vn run-51.3.2-2-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | ||||
| 5 | say speech: assert | participle | about someone; often property | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that 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:036-dim-and-round-the-bend.lesson:11.
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 ×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/36-dim-and-round-the-bend/11/