Soft words for hard things: stupidity and madness and rudeness and swearing, sentence 6

"Bats in the belfry" means mad; it is an old-fashioned joke, as if bats were flapping about in the bell tower of one's head.

Who acts: Bats, belfry · What happens: mean, be, flap · To what, where: fashioned joke

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 (Bats, belfry), 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 belfry	punct
2	Bats	bat	NOUN	Number=Plur	7 means	nsubj
3	in	in	ADP	_	5 belfry	case
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 belfry	det
5	belfry	belfry	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 Bats	nmod
6	"	"	PUNCT	_	5 belfry	punct
7	means	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
8	mad	mad	ADJ	Degree=Pos	7 means	xcomp
9	;	;	PUNCT	_	16 joke	punct
10	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	16 joke	nsubj
11	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	16 joke	cop
12	an	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	16 joke	det
13	old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	15 fashioned	amod
14	-	-	PUNCT	_	13 old	punct
15	fashioned	fashioned	ADJ	Degree=Pos	16 joke	amod
16	joke	joke	NOUN	Number=Sing	7 means	parataxis
17	,	,	PUNCT	_	22 flapping	punct
18	as	as	SCONJ	_	22 flapping	mark
19	if	if	SCONJ	_	22 flapping	mark
20	bats	bat	NOUN	Number=Plur	22 flapping	nsubj
21	were	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	22 flapping	aux
22	flapping	flap	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	16 joke	advcl
23	about	about	ADP	_	27 tower	case
24	in	in	ADP	_	27 tower	case
25	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	27 tower	det
26	bell	bell	NOUN	Number=Sing	27 tower	compound
27	tower	tower	NOUN	Number=Sing	22 flapping	obl
28	of	of	ADP	_	31 head	case
29	one	one	PRON	Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	31 head	nmod:poss
30	's	's	PART	_	29 one	case
31	head	head	NOUN	Number=Sing	27 tower	nmod
32	.	.	PUNCT	_	7 means	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	mean	present	Bats in the belfry		mad property	vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent
2	is a	present	belfry	a fashioned joke		tree rules
3	flap	past · progressive	bats		about the bell tower of one's head	vn modes_of_being_with_motion-47.3 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme about tower=Location

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:6.

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, 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/37-bats-and-gosh/6/