---
title: "A little stranger" means a baby that is expected (old-fashioned, UK). — Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth… · tree and pragmatics
description: "A little stranger" means a baby that is expected (old-fashioned, UK). Who acts: little stranger. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth and relations and family» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every
---

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# Soft words for hard things: pregnancy and birth and relations and family, sentence 8

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"A little stranger" means a baby that is expected (old-fashioned, UK).

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**Who acts:** little stranger · **What happens:** mean, expect · **To what, where:** baby

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:012-birth-and-couples.lesson:8
# text = "A little stranger" means a baby that is expected (old-fashioned, UK).
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 012-birth-and-couples.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): no change
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	_
2	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	stranger	stranger	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	baby	baby	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
9	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	11	nsubj:pass	_	_
10	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	11	aux:pass	_	_
11	expected	expect	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	8	acl:relcl	_	_
12	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	15	punct	_	_
13	old	old	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	15	amod	_	_
14	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	13	punct	_	_
15	fashioned	fashioned	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	conj	_	_
16	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	17	punct	_	_
17	UK	UK	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	6	parataxis	_	_
18	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	17	punct	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | a little stranger | a baby |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent baby=Topic |
| 2 | **expect** | present · passive |  | a baby |  |  |  |  | vn conjecture-29.5-1 «NP V NP»: subject=Theme |

<!-- .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:012-birth-and-couples.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): 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](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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- ← previous: [Soft words for hard things: pregnancy…, 7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/12-birth-and-couples/7/)
- next →: [Soft words for hard things: pregnancy…, 9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/12-birth-and-couples/9/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/12-birth-and-couples/)