---
title: "Deferred success" is a joking UK phrase for failure. — Soft words for hard things: school reports and t… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Deferred success" is a joking UK phrase for failure. Who acts: Deferred success. 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 and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Soft words for hard things: school reports and teachers and animals and pets, sentence 9

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Deferred success" is a joking UK phrase for failure.

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**Who acts:** Deferred success · **What happens:** defer, joke, be · **To what, where:** joking UK phrase · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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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 (Deferred success), 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:9
# text = "Deferred success" is a joking UK phrase for failure.
# 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	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	Deferred	defer	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	3	amod	_	_
3	success	success	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	cop	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
7	joking	joke	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	9	amod	_	_
8	UK	UK	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	9	compound	_	_
9	phrase	phrase	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
10	for	for	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	failure	failure	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: changed act=assert

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **defer** *in a quote* | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn acquiesce-95.1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **joke** *speech: other* | gerund |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn chit\_chat-37.6 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **is a** | present | Deferred success | a joking UK phrase |  |  |  | for failure | 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:017-school-and-pets.lesson:9`.

**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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