---
title: "Acting out" means behaving badly because of upset feelings. — Soft words for hard things: children's behaviour… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Acting out" means behaving badly because of upset feelings. Who acts: Acting. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: children's behaviour and school reports and teachers» 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: children's behaviour and school reports and teachers, sentence 11

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"Acting out" means behaving badly because of upset feelings.

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**Who acts:** Acting · **What happens:** act out, mean, behave · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: children's behaviour and school reports and teachers» 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 (Acting), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:015-behaviour-and-school-reports.lesson:11
# text = "Acting out" means behaving badly because of upset feelings.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 015-behaviour-and-school-reports.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	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Acting	act	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	csubj	_	_
3	out	out	ADP	RP	_	2	compound:prt	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
5	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	behaving	behave	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	ccomp	_	_
7	badly	badly	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	6	advmod	_	_
8	because	because	ADP	IN	ExtPos=ADP	11	case	_	_
9	of	of	ADP	IN	_	8	fixed	_	_
10	upset	upset	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	feelings	feeling	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obl	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	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 | **act out** *in a quote* | gerund |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn act-114-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **mean** | present | Acting |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **behave** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  | because upset feelings; badly *property* | vn masquerade-29.6-1 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Agent |

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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:015-behaviour-and-school-reports.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): 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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