Idioms taken literally, sentence 8
"Cost an arm and a leg" means cost a lot of money; it is a deliberate exaggeration, called hyperbole.
Who acts: lot, deliberate exaggeration · What happens: cost, mean, be, call · To what, where: arm, lot, deliberate exaggeration, hyperbole · 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 (lot, deliberate exaggeration), 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 Cost | punct |
| 2 | Cost | cost | VERB | Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin | 9 means | nsubj |
| 3 | an | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 4 arm | det |
| 4 | arm | arm | NOUN | Number=Sing | 2 Cost | obj |
| 5 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 7 leg | cc |
| 6 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 7 leg | det |
| 7 | leg | leg | NOUN | Number=Sing | 4 arm | conj |
| 8 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 2 Cost | punct |
| 9 | means | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 10 | cost | cost | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 9 means | ccomp |
| 11 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 12 lot | det |
| 12 | lot | lot | NOUN | Number=Sing | 10 cost | obj |
| 13 | of | of | ADP | _ | 14 money | case |
| 14 | money | money | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 lot | nmod |
| 15 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 20 exaggeration | punct |
| 16 | it | it | PRON | Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs | 20 exaggeration | nsubj |
| 17 | is | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin | 20 exaggeration | cop |
| 18 | a | a | DET | Definite=Ind PronType=Art | 20 exaggeration | det |
| 19 | deliberate | deliberate | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 20 exaggeration | amod |
| 20 | exaggeration | exaggeration | NOUN | Number=Sing | 9 means | parataxis |
| 21 | , | , | PUNCT | _ | 22 called | punct |
| 22 | called | call | VERB | Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass | 20 exaggeration | acl |
| 23 | hyperbole | hyperbole | NOUN | Number=Sing | 22 called | xcomp |
| 24 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 9 means | punct |
Pragmatics
- form
- statement
- act
- assert
- voice
- narrator
- polarity
- none
- teacher
- changed form=decl, act=assert, voice=narrator
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | cost in a quote | infinitive | a arm and a leg | vn cost-54.2 «NP V NP.value»: agent=Theme arm=Value | |||||
| 2 | mean | present | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic | ||||||
| 3 | cost | infinitive | a lot of money | vn cost-54.2 «NP V NP.value»: agent=Theme lot=Value | |||||
| 4 | is a | present | lot | a deliberate exaggeration | tree rules | ||||
| 5 | call | participle | a deliberate exaggeration not said here | hyperbole | vn initiate_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
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:8.
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): R1-cc-next ×1, R6-punct-agree ×2. 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/8/