Soft words for hard things: the toilet and bodily functions, sentence 10

"Spend a penny" is an old British way to say use the toilet; public toilets once cost a penny.

Who acts: you, public toilets · What happens: spend, be, say, use, cost · To what, where: penny, old British way, toilet · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: the toilet and bodily functions» 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 (you, public toilets), 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 Spend	punct
2	Spend	spend	VERB	Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	4 penny	det
4	penny	penny	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 Spend	obj
5	"	"	PUNCT	_	2 Spend	punct
6	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	10 way	cop
7	an	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	10 way	det
8	old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	10 way	amod
9	British	British	ADJ	Degree=Pos	10 way	amod
10	way	way	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 Spend	ccomp
11	to	to	PART	_	12 say	mark
12	say	say	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	10 way	acl
13	use	use	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	12 say	ccomp
14	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	15 toilet	det
15	toilet	toilet	NOUN	Number=Sing	13 use	obj
16	;	;	PUNCT	_	20 cost	punct
17	public	public	ADJ	Degree=Pos	18 toilets	amod
18	toilets	toilet	NOUN	Number=Plur	20 cost	nsubj
19	once	once	ADV	_	20 cost	advmod
20	cost	cost	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 Spend	parataxis
21	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	22 penny	det
22	penny	penny	NOUN	Number=Sing	20 cost	obj
23	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 Spend	punct

Pragmatics

form: statement
act: assert
voice: narrator
polarity: none
teacher: changed form=decl, act=assert, voice=narrator

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	spend in a quote	imperative	you not said here	a penny		vn consume-66-1 «NP V NP S_ING»: agent=Agent penny=Asset clause=Goal
2	is a	present	you not said here	a old British way		tree rules
3	say speech: assert	to-infinitive	you not said here			vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
4	use	infinitive		the toilet		vn eat-39.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent toilet=Patient
5	cost	past	public toilets	a penny	once property	vn cost-54.2 «NP V NP.value»: agent=Theme penny=Value

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:006-toilet-words.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): R5-strong ×1, 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/6-toilet-words/10/