---
title: "Pre-emptive strike" means attacking first, before the enemy attacks… — Soft words for hard things: war, the military an… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Pre-emptive strike" means attacking first, before the enemy attacks you. Who acts: Pre-emptive strike, enemy. 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 
---

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# Soft words for hard things: war, the military and violence, sentence 18

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Pre-emptive strike" means attacking first, before the enemy attacks you.

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**Who acts:** Pre-emptive strike, enemy · **What happens:** mean, attack · **To what, where:** you

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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 (Pre-emptive strike, enemy), 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:18
# text = "Pre-emptive strike" means attacking first, before the enemy attacks you.
# 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): R7-rel-agree ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	Pre-emptive	pre-emptive	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	strike	strike	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	attacking	attack	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	xcomp	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=5:ccomp
7	first	first	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Ord	6	advmod	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
9	before	before	SCONJ	IN	_	12	mark	_	_
10	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
11	enemy	enemy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
12	attacks	attack	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	advcl	_	_
13	you	you	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Person=2|PronType=Prs	12	obj	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- 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 | Pre-emptive strike |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **attack** *not said to happen* | gerund | Pre-emptive strike *not said here* |  |  |  |  | first *property* | vn attack-60.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **attack** | present | the enemy | you |  |  |  |  | vn attack-60.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent you=Patient |

<!-- .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:18`.

**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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