---
title: A "fib" is a small lie. — Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and th… · tree and pragmatics
description: A "fib" is a small lie. Who acts: fib. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and the police and lying and honesty» 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 and lying and honesty, sentence 15

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A "fib" is a small lie.

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**Who acts:** fib · **What happens:** be · **To what, where:** small lie

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:028-stealing-and-lying.lesson:15
# text = A "fib" is a small lie.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 028-stealing-and-lying.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	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
3	fib	fib	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	8	cop	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
7	small	small	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	lie	lie	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	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 | **is a** | present | a fib | a small lie |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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:028-stealing-and-lying.lesson:15`.

**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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