---
title: "Started a family" means had their first child. — Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth · tree and pragmatics
description: "Started a family" means had their first child. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth, sentence 11

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Started a family" means had their first child.

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**What happens:** start, mean, have · **To what, where:** family, first child · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth» 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: what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:011-pregnancy-and-birth.lesson:11
# text = "Started a family" means had their first child.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 011-pregnancy-and-birth.lesson
# annotation = 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
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Started	start	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	csubj	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	family	family	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=6:nsubj
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	had	have	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	6	ccomp	_	_
8	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	10	nmod:poss	_	_
9	first	first	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos|NumForm=Word|NumType=Ord	10	amod	_	_
10	child	child	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **start** *in a quote* | past |  | a family |  |  |  |  | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent family=Eventuality |
| 2 | **mean** | present |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **have** | past |  | babies's first child |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent child=Patient |

<!-- .note -->
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.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/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:011-pregnancy-and-birth.lesson:11`.

**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. **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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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