Idioms taken literally, sentence 9

"Bite the bullet" means face something unpleasant bravely; the story about soldiers biting bullets is often told but not proven.

Who acts: soldiers · What happens: bite, mean, face, tell, not prove · To what, where: bullet, something, bullets, story · 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 (soldiers), 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 Bite	punct
2	Bite	bite	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	6 means	csubj
3	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	4 bullet	det
4	bullet	bullet	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 Bite	obj
5	"	"	PUNCT	_	2 Bite	punct
6	means	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
7	face	face	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	6 means	xcomp
8	something	something	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Ind	7 face	obj
9	unpleasant	unpleasant	ADJ	Degree=Pos	8 something	amod
10	bravely	bravely	ADV	_	7 face	advmod
11	;	;	PUNCT	_	13 story	punct
12	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	13 story	det
13	story	story	NOUN	Number=Sing	20 told	nsubj:pass
14	about	about	ADP	_	15 soldiers	case
15	soldiers	soldier	NOUN	Number=Plur	13 story	nmod
16	biting	bite	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	15 soldiers	acl
17	bullets	bullet	NOUN	Number=Plur	16 biting	obj
18	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	20 told	aux:pass
19	often	often	ADV	_	20 told	advmod
20	told	tell	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	6 means	parataxis
21	but	but	CCONJ	_	23 proven	cc
22	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	23 proven	advmod
23	proven	prove	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	20 told	conj
24	.	.	PUNCT	_	6 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	other	roles by
1	bite in a quote	infinitive		the bullet		vn swat-18.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bullet=Patient
2	mean	present				vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
3	face not said to happen	infinitive		something	bravely property	vn fill-9.8-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Theme something=Destination
4	bite	gerund	soldiers not said here	bullets		vn swat-18.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent bullet=Patient
5	tell speech: assert	present · passive		the story about soldiers	often property	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: subject=Recipient
6	not prove	participle				vn declare-29.4-1-1 «NP V what S_INF»: 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: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): no change. 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/9/