---
title: "Doing time" means serving a prison sentence. — Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and th… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Doing time" means serving a prison sentence. Who acts: Doing. 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 9

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"Doing time" means serving a prison sentence.

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**Who acts:** Doing · **What happens:** do, mean, serve · **To what, where:** prison sentence · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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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 (Doing), 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:9
# text = "Doing time" means serving a prison sentence.
# 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
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Doing	do	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	5	csubj	_	_
3	time	time	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=3:punct
5	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	serving	serve	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	5	xcomp	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	prison	prison	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	compound	_	_
9	sentence	sentence	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obj	_	_
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
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 | **do** *in a quote* | gerund |  |  |  |  | time |  | vn act-114-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **mean** | present | Doing |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **serve** *not said to happen* | gerund | Doing *not said here* | a prison sentence |  |  |  |  | vn masquerade-29.6-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent sentence=Attribute |

<!-- .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:9`.

**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. **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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