---
title: "Collateral damage" is official military language for ordinary peopl… — Soft words for hard things: death and dying · tree and pragmatics
description: "Collateral damage" is official military language for ordinary people killed or property destroyed by accident in an attack. Who acts: Collateral damage. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: death and dying» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree 
---

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# Soft words for hard things: death and dying, sentence 8

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"Collateral damage" is official military language for ordinary people killed or property destroyed by accident in an attack.

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**Who acts:** Collateral damage · **What happens:** be, kill, destroy · **To what, where:** official military language, ordinary people, attack

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:002-death-official-and-slang.lesson:8
# text = "Collateral damage" is official military language for ordinary people killed or property destroyed by accident in an attack.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 002-death-official-and-slang.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	Collateral	collateral	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	compound	_	_
3	damage	damage	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	8	cop	_	_
6	official	official	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
7	military	military	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	language	language	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
9	for	for	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
10	ordinary	ordinary	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	nmod	_	_
12	killed	kill	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	11	acl	_	_
13	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	14	cc	_	_
14	property	property	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	conj	_	_
15	destroyed	destroy	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	11	acl	_	_
16	by	by	ADP	IN	_	17	case	_	_
17	accident	accident	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	obl	_	_
18	in	in	ADP	IN	_	20	case	_	_
19	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	20	det	_	_
20	attack	attack	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	obl	_	_
21	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | Collateral damage | official military language |  |  |  | for ordinary people or property | tree rules |
| 2 | **kill** | participle |  | ordinary people or property *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer |
| 3 | **destroy** | participle |  | ordinary people or property *not said here* |  | a attack |  | by accident | vn destroy-44 «NP V NP»: 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:002-death-official-and-slang.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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