---
title: "Voluntary severance" means being paid to leave one's job. — Soft words for hard things: work, firing and the… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Voluntary severance" means being paid to leave one's job. Who acts: Voluntary severance, one. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: work, firing and the economy» 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: work, firing and the economy, sentence 13

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Voluntary severance" means being paid to leave one's job.

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**Who acts:** Voluntary severance, one · **What happens:** mean, pay, leave, job · **To what, where:** job

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: work, firing and the economy» 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 (Voluntary severance, one), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:021-work-firing-and-the-economy.lesson:13
# text = "Voluntary severance" means being paid to leave one's job.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 021-work-firing-and-the-economy.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): R8-pos-agree ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	Voluntary	voluntary	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	severance	severance	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	being	be	AUX	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	7	aux:pass	_	_
7	paid	pay	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	5	xcomp	_	_
8	to	to	PART	TO	_	9	mark	_	_
9	leave	leave	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	7	advcl	_	_
10	one	one	PRON	PRP	Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nmod:poss	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=12:nmod:poss|HaikuPos=NOUN:NN:Number=Sing
11	's	's	PART	POS	_	10	case	_	_
12	job	job	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	obj	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Voluntary severance |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **pay** *not said to happen* | gerund · passive | Voluntary severance *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn pay-68-1 «NP V NP» |
| 3 | **leave** | to-infinitive | Voluntary severance *not said here* | one's job |  |  |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent job=Theme |
| 4 | **job** |  | one |  |  |  |  |  | nom job «act intransitive»: poss=agent |

<!-- .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:021-work-firing-and-the-economy.lesson:13`.

**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): R8-pos-agree ×1. **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: work, firi…, 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/21-work-firing-and-the-economy/12/)
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