---
title: "Flexible hours" often means irregular hours with no guaranteed pay. — Soft words for hard things: work, firing and the… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Flexible hours" often means irregular hours with no guaranteed pay. Who acts: Flexible hours. 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 22

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"Flexible hours" often means irregular hours with no guaranteed pay.

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**Who acts:** Flexible hours · **What happens:** mean, guarantee

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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 (Flexible hours), 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:22
# text = "Flexible hours" often means irregular hours with no guaranteed pay.
# 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): no change
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	Flexible	flexible	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	hours	hour	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	often	often	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	irregular	irregular	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	hours	hour	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obj	_	_
9	with	with	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
10	no	no	DET	DT	PronType=Neg	12	det	_	_
11	guaranteed	guarantee	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	12	amod	_	_
12	pay	pay	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nmod	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Flexible hours |  |  |  | hour | often *property* | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **guarantee** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn ensure-99 «NP V that S»: agent=Precondition |

<!-- .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:22`.

**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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