---
title: "Better half" means husband or wife (jokey). — Soft words for hard things: relations and family · tree and pragmatics
description: "Better half" means husband or wife (jokey). Who acts: Better half. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: relations and family» 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: relations and family, sentence 7

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Better half" means husband or wife (jokey).

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Better half · **What happens:** mean · **To what, where:** husband

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:013-relations-and-family.lesson:7
# text = "Better half" means husband or wife (jokey).
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 013-relations-and-family.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	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	Better	good	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	3	amod	_	_
3	half	half	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing|NumForm=Word|NumType=Frac	5	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	husband	husband	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	_
7	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	wife	wife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	conj	_	_
9	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	10	punct	_	_
10	jokey	jokey	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
11	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	10	punct	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	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 | **mean** | present | Better half | husband or wife |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent husband=Topic |

<!-- .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:013-relations-and-family.lesson:7`.

**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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