---
title: "Degrade" in war talk means damage or destroy, often killing many pe… — Soft words for hard things: war, the military an… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Degrade" in war talk means damage or destroy, often killing many people. Who acts: Degrade. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: war, the military and violence» 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: war, the military and violence, sentence 10

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Degrade" in war talk means damage or destroy, often killing many people.

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**Who acts:** Degrade · **What happens:** mean, destroy, kill · **To what, where:** damage, many people

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:026-war-and-the-military.lesson:10
# text = "Degrade" in war talk means damage or destroy, often killing many people.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 026-war-and-the-military.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	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Degrade	Degrade	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
3	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
4	in	in	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
5	war	war	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	_
6	talk	talk	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nmod	_	_
7	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
8	damage	damage	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	_
9	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	10	cc	_	_
10	destroy	destroy	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	8	conj	_	_
11	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	13	punct	_	_
12	often	often	ADV	RB	_	13	advmod	_	_
13	killing	kill	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	7	conj	_	_
14	many	many	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	15	amod	_	_
15	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	13	obj	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Degrade in war talk | damage |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent damage=Topic |
| 2 | **destroy** | infinitive | Degrade in war talk *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn destroy-44 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **kill** | gerund | Degrade in war talk *not said here* | many people |  |  |  | often *property* | vn remove-10.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent people=Theme |

<!-- .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:026-war-and-the-military.lesson:10`.

**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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