Idioms taken literally, sentence 10
"Hit the nail on the head" means be exactly right; it comes from carpentry, where a nail hit exactly goes straight in.
Who acts: nail, nail hit · What happens: hit, mean, be, come, go · To what, where: nail, carpentry · Speech: someone speaks here
This is a sentence of the lesson «Idioms taken literally» of the language 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 (nail, nail hit), 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 Hit | punct |
| 2 | Hit | hit | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | 9 means | nsubj |
| 3 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 4 nail | det |
| 4 | nail | nail | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 Hit | obj |
| 5 | on | on | ADP | _ | 7 head | case |
| 6 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 7 head | det |
| 7 | head | head | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 Hit | obl |
| 8 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 2 Hit | punct |
| 9 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 10 | be | be | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 9 means | ccomp |
| 11 | exactly | exactly | ADV | _ | 12 right | advmod |
| 12 | right | right | ADV | _ | 10 be | advmod |
| 13 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 15 comes | punct |
| 14 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 15 comes | nsubj |
| 15 | comes | come | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 9 means | parataxis |
| 16 | from | from | ADP | _ | 17 carpentry | case |
| 17 | carpentry | carpentry | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 comes | obl |
| 18 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 24 goes | punct |
| 19 | where | where | ADV | PronType=Rel | 24 goes | advmod |
| 20 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 22 hit | det |
| 21 | nail | nail | NOUN | Number=Sing | 22 hit | compound |
| 22 | hit | hit | NOUN | Number=Sing | 24 goes | nsubj |
| 23 | exactly | exactly | ADV | _ | 24 goes | advmod |
| 24 | goes | go | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 17 carpentry | acl:relcl |
| 25 | straight | straight | ADV | _ | 26 in | advmod |
| 26 | in | in | ADV | _ | 24 goes | advmod |
| 27 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 9 means | punct |
Pragmatics
No stored speech act for this sentence.
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | hit in a quote | infinitive | the nail | on the head | vn hit-18.1-1 «NP V NP PP»: agent=Agent nail=Instrument on head=Patient | ||||
| 2 | mean | present | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | ||||||
| 3 | be | infinitive | right property | vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme | |||||
| 4 | come | present | nail | carpentry | vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V PP.initial_location»: agent=Theme from carpentry=Initial_Location | ||||
| 5 | go | present | a nail hit | exactly property | vn disappearance-48.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |
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:language:025-idioms-taken-literally.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 ×6, 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/language/25-idioms-taken-literally/10/