Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing, sentence 9
"Flip the bird" means raise the middle finger as an insult; it is American slang.
Who acts: finger · What happens: flip, mean, raise, be · To what, where: bird, middle finger, American slang · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: 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 (finger), 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 Flip | punct |
| 2 | Flip | flip | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | 6 means | nsubj |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 4 bird | det |
| 4 | bird | bird | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 Flip | obj |
| 5 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 2 Flip | punct |
| 6 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 7 | raise | raise | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 6 means | ccomp |
| 8 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 10 finger | det |
| 9 | middle | middle | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 10 finger | amod |
| 10 | finger | finger | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 raise | obj |
| 11 | as | as | ADP | _ | 13 insult | case |
| 12 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 13 insult | det |
| 13 | insult | insult | NOUN | Number=Sing | 7 raise | obl |
| 14 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 18 slang | punct |
| 15 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 18 slang | nsubj |
| 16 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 18 slang | cop |
| 17 | American | American | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 18 slang | amod |
| 18 | slang | slang | NOUN | Number=Sing | 6 means | parataxis |
| 19 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 6 means | punct |
Pragmatics
- form
- statement
- act
- assert
- voice
- narrator
- polarity
- none
- teacher
- changed act=assert
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | flip in a quote | infinitive | the bird | vn throw-17.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bird=Theme | |||||
| 2 | mean | present | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | ||||||
| 3 | raise | infinitive | the middle finger | as a insult | vn put_direction-9.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent finger=Theme | ||||
| 4 | is a | present | finger | American slang | 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:040-with-all-due-respect.lesson:9.
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. 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/40-with-all-due-respect/9/