---
title: The soft word is a kindness or a joke, but the plain meaning underne… — Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth · tree and pragmatics
description: The soft word is a kindness or a joke, but the plain meaning underneath is always the same. Who acts: soft word, meaning underneath. 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 pragmatic
---

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# Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth, sentence 2

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The soft word is a kindness or a joke, but the plain meaning underneath is always the same.

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**Who acts:** soft word, meaning underneath · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** kindness

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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: who acts (soft word, meaning underneath), 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:2
# text = The soft word is a kindness or a joke, but the plain meaning underneath is always the same.
# 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 ×2
1	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	soft	soft	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	word	word	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
4	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	kindness	kindness	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
7	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	9	cc	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	joke	joke	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	conj	_	_
10	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	19	punct	_	_
11	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	19	cc	_	_
12	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	14	det	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=15:det
13	plain	plain	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=15:amod
14	meaning	meaning	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	compound	_	_
15	underneath	underneath	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	19	nsubj	_	_
16	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	19	cop	_	_
17	always	always	ADV	RB	PronType=Tot	19	advmod	_	_
18	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	19	det	_	_
19	same	same	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	conj	_	_
20	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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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 | **is a** | present | the soft word | a kindness or a joke |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **is** | present | meaning underneath |  |  |  |  | always, same *property* | tree rules |

<!-- .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: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): R5-strong ×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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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