---
title: "Private military contractor" is the official name for a hired soldi… — Soft words for hard things: war, the military an… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Private military contractor" is the official name for a hired soldier, a mercenary. Who acts: Private military contractor. 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 pragmat
---

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# Soft words for hard things: war, the military and violence, sentence 23

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Private military contractor" is the official name for a hired soldier, a mercenary.

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**Who acts:** Private military contractor · **What happens:** be, hire · **To what, where:** official name

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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 (Private military contractor), 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:23
# text = "Private military contractor" is the official name for a hired soldier, a mercenary.
# 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	``	_	4	punct	_	_
2	Private	private	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
3	military	military	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	contractor	contractor	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	cop	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	official	official	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	name	name	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
10	for	for	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
11	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
12	hired	hire	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	13	amod	_	_
13	soldier	soldier	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nmod	_	_
14	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	16	punct	_	_
15	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
16	mercenary	mercenary	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	appos	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | Private military contractor | the official name |  |  |  | for a hired soldier | tree rules |
| 2 | **hire** | participle |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn get-13.5.1 «NP V NP»: agent=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:026-war-and-the-military.lesson:23`.

**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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