A bit nippy and not ideal: British understatement, sentence 2

People play things down to stay calm, to be polite, to avoid sounding big-headed, or to make a dry joke when something has gone wrong.

Who acts: People, something · What happens: play down, stay, be, avoid, sound, make · To what, where: things, dry joke

This is a sentence of the lesson «A bit nippy and not ideal: British understatement» 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 (People, something), 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	People	people	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 play	nsubj
2	play	play	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	things	thing	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 play	obj
4	down	down	ADP	_	2 play	compound:prt
5	to	to	PART	_	6 stay	mark
6	stay	stay	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 play	advcl
7	calm	calm	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 stay	xcomp
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	11 polite	punct
9	to	to	PART	_	11 polite	mark
10	be	be	AUX	VerbForm=Inf	11 polite	cop
11	polite	polite	ADJ	Degree=Pos	7 calm	conj
12	,	,	PUNCT	_	14 avoid	punct
13	to	to	PART	_	14 avoid	mark
14	avoid	avoid	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	2 play	conj
15	sounding	sound	VERB	VerbForm=Ger	14 avoid	xcomp
16	big	big	ADJ	Degree=Pos	18 headed	amod
17	-	-	PUNCT	_	16 big	punct
18	headed	head	ADJ	Degree=Pos	15 sounding	xcomp
19	,	,	PUNCT	_	22 make	punct
20	or	or	CCONJ	_	22 make	cc
21	to	to	PART	_	22 make	mark
22	make	make	VERB	Mood=Imp VerbForm=Fin	14 avoid	parataxis
23	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	25 joke	det
24	dry	dry	ADJ	Degree=Pos	25 joke	amod
25	joke	joke	NOUN	Number=Sing	22 make	obj
26	when	when	ADV	PronType=Int	29 gone	advmod
27	something	something	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Ind	29 gone	nsubj
28	has	have	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	29 gone	aux
29	gone	go	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part	22 make	advcl
30	wrong	wrong	ADJ	Degree=Pos	29 gone	xcomp
31	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 play	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	play down	present	People	things		vn use-105.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent thing=Theme
2	stay	to-infinitive	People not said here		calm property	vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
3	is	to-infinitive	People not said here		polite property	tree rules
4	avoid	to-infinitive	People not said here			vn avoid-52 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Theme
5	sound	gerund	People not said here		head property	vn stimulus_subject-30.4 «NP V ADJ»: agent=Stimulus
6	make	to-infinitive		a dry joke		vn build-26.1-1 «NP.asset V NP»: agent=Asset joke=Product
7	go	present · perfect	something		wrong 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:049-a-bit-nippy-and-not-ideal-british-understatement.lesson:2.

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): R7-rel-agree ×3. 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/49-a-bit-nippy-and-not-ideal-british-understatement/2/