Soft words for hard things: stupidity and madness and rudeness and swearing, sentence 12
"Not the sharpest knife in the drawer" means not very clever; it is a humorous phrase.
Who acts: sharpest knife, knife · What happens: mean, be · To what, where: humorous phrase
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: stupidity and madness and rudeness and swearing» 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 knife, knife), 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 knife | punct |
| 2 | Not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 5 knife | advmod |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 5 knife | det |
| 4 | sharpest | sharp | ADJ | Degree=Sup | 5 knife | amod |
| 5 | knife | knife | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 means | nsubj |
| 6 | in | in | ADP | _ | 8 drawer | case |
| 7 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 8 drawer | det |
| 8 | drawer | drawer | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 knife | nmod |
| 9 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 knife | punct |
| 10 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 11 | not | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 13 clever | advmod |
| 12 | very | very | ADV | _ | 13 clever | advmod |
| 13 | clever | clever | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 10 means | xcomp |
| 14 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 19 phrase | punct |
| 15 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 19 phrase | nsubj |
| 16 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 19 phrase | cop |
| 17 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 19 phrase | det |
| 18 | humorous | humorous | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 19 phrase | amod |
| 19 | phrase | phrase | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 means | parataxis |
| 20 | . | . | 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 | mean | present | the sharpest knife in the drawer | clever property | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent | ||||
| 2 | is a | present | knife | a humorous phrase | tree rules |
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:037-bats-and-gosh.lesson:12.
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): 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/37-bats-and-gosh/12/