---
title: "Sticky fingers" means a habit of stealing. — Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and th… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Sticky fingers" means a habit of stealing. Who acts: Sticky fingers. 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 22

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"Sticky fingers" means a habit of stealing.

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**Who acts:** Sticky fingers · **What happens:** mean · **To what, where:** habit

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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 (Sticky fingers), 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:22
# text = "Sticky fingers" means a habit of stealing.
# 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): R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-agree ×2
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=5:punct
2	Sticky	sticky	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	fingers	finger	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	5	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	habit	habit	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	_
8	of	of	SCONJ	IN	_	9	mark	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=9:case|HaikuPos=ADP:IN:_
9	stealing	stealing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	acl	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=7:nmod
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	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 | Sticky fingers | a habit |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent habit=Topic |

<!-- .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:027-crime-prison-and-police.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): R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-agree ×2. **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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