---
title: Schools soften bad news about trouble and failure, and families soft… — Soft words for hard things: school reports and t… · tree and pragmatics
description: Schools soften bad news about trouble and failure, and families soften bad news about pets. Who acts: Schools, families. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: school reports and teachers and animals and pets» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree 
---

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# Soft words for hard things: school reports and teachers and animals and pets, sentence 0

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Schools soften bad news about trouble and failure, and families soften bad news about pets.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Schools, families · **What happens:** soften · **To what, where:** bad news

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: school reports and teachers and animals and pets» 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 (Schools, families), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:017-school-and-pets.lesson:0
# text = Schools soften bad news about trouble and failure, and families soften bad news about pets.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 017-school-and-pets.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	Schools	school	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	nsubj	_	_
2	soften	soften	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	bad	bad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	news	news	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	about	about	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
6	trouble	trouble	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	nmod	_	_
7	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	8	cc	_	_
8	failure	failure	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	conj	_	_
9	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
10	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
11	families	family	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	nsubj	_	_
12	soften	soften	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
13	bad	bad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	_
14	news	news	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	obj	_	_
15	about	about	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
16	pets	pet	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	nmod	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	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 | **soften** | present | Schools | bad news |  |  |  | about trouble and failure | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent news=Patient |
| 2 | **soften** | present | families | bad news |  |  |  | about pets | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP V NP.patient»: agent=Agent news=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:017-school-and-pets.lesson:0`.

**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: school rep…, 24](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/16-school-reports/24/)
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- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/17-school-and-pets/)