---
title: "Given his marching orders" means fired or told to leave (mostly UK). — Soft words for hard things: work, firing and the… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Given his marching orders" means fired or told to leave (mostly UK). Who acts: marching orders, severance. 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 claus
---

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# Soft words for hard things: work, firing and the economy, sentence 15

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Given his marching orders" means fired or told to leave (mostly UK).

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** marching orders, severance · **What happens:** mean, fire, tell, leave, order · **To what, where:** UK · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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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 (marching orders, severance), 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:15
# text = "Given his marching orders" means fired or told to leave (mostly UK).
# 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): R7-rel-agree ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	8	punct	_	_
2	Given	give	ADP	IN	_	5	case	_	_
3	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	5	nmod:poss	_	_
4	marching	march	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	compound	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=5:amod|HaikuPos=VERB:VBG:VerbForm=Ger
5	orders	order	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
6	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
7	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
8	fired	fire	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	7	ccomp	_	_
9	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	told	tell	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	8	conj	_	_
11	to	to	PART	TO	_	12	mark	_	_
12	leave	leave	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	xcomp	_	_
13	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	15	punct	_	_
14	mostly	mostly	ADV	RB	_	15	advmod	_	_
15	UK	UK	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	12	obj	_	_
16	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	15	punct	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	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 | severance's marching orders |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **fire** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn throw-17.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **tell** *speech: assert* | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V how S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 4 | **leave** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive |  | UK |  |  |  |  | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent uk=Theme |
| 5 | **order** *in a quote* |  | severance |  |  |  |  |  | nom order «communication transitive»: 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:15`.

**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): R7-rel-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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