---
title: "Protective custody" means keeping a prisoner alone for their own sa… — Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and th… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Protective custody" means keeping a prisoner alone for their own safety. Who acts: Protective custody. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and the police» 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: crime, prison and the police, sentence 17

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"Protective custody" means keeping a prisoner alone for their own safety.

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**Who acts:** Protective custody · **What happens:** mean, keep · **To what, where:** prisoner

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and the police» 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 (Protective custody), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:027-crime-prison-and-police.lesson:17
# text = "Protective custody" means keeping a prisoner alone for their own safety.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 027-crime-prison-and-police.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	Protective	protective	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	custody	custody	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	keeping	keep	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	xcomp	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=5:ccomp
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	prisoner	prisoner	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
9	alone	alone	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
10	for	for	ADP	IN	_	13	case	_	_
11	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	13	nmod:poss	_	_
12	own	own	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	_
13	safety	safety	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obl	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Protective custody |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **keep** *not said to happen* | gerund | Protective custody *not said here* | a prisoner |  |  |  | for crime's own safety; alone *property* | vn keep-15.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent prisoner=Theme |

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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:027-crime-prison-and-police.lesson:17`.

**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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- ← previous: [Soft words for hard things: crime, pri…, 16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/27-crime-prison-and-police/16/)
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