---
title: A "white lie" is a harmless lie told to spare someone's feelings. — Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and th… · tree and pragmatics
description: A "white lie" is a harmless lie told to spare someone's feelings. Who acts: white lie, harmless lie. 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
---

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# Soft words for hard things: crime, prison and the police and lying and honesty, sentence 16

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
A "white lie" is a harmless lie told to spare someone's feelings.

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**Who acts:** white lie, harmless lie · **What happens:** be, tell, spare · **To what, where:** harmless lie, feelings · **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 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 (white lie, harmless lie), 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:16
# text = A "white lie" is a harmless lie told to spare someone's feelings.
# 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): R5-strong ×1, R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=9:det
2	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	_
3	white	white	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	lie	lie	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=9:appos
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	cop	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	harmless	harmless	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	lie	lie	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
10	told	tell	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	to	to	PART	TO	_	12	mark	_	_
12	spare	spare	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	xcomp	_	_
13	someone	someone	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	15	nmod:poss	_	_
14	's	's	PART	POS	_	13	case	_	_
15	feelings	feeling	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	obj	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=10: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 | a white lie | a harmless lie |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **tell** *speech: assert* | past | a harmless lie |  |  |  |  |  | vn transfer\_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V how S\_INF»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **spare** *not said to happen* | to-infinitive | a harmless lie *not said here* | someone's feelings |  |  |  |  | vn bill-54.5 «NP V NP NP.asset»: agent=Agent feeling=Asset |

<!-- .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:028-stealing-and-lying.lesson:16`.

**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): R5-strong ×1, R6-punct-agree ×1, 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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