---
title: "Brown bread" means dead; it is London rhyming slang ("bread" rhymes… — Soft words for hard things: death and dying, ill… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Brown bread" means dead; it is London rhyming slang ("bread" rhymes with "dead"). Who acts: Brown bread, London slang, bread. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: death and dying, illness and the body» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and t
---

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# Soft words for hard things: death and dying, illness and the body, sentence 19

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"Brown bread" means dead; it is London rhyming slang ("bread" rhymes with "dead").

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**Who acts:** Brown bread, London slang, bread · **What happens:** mean, rhyme, be · **To what, where:** London slang

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: death and dying, illness and the body» 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 (Brown bread, London slang, bread), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:003-death-and-feeling-poorly.lesson:19
# text = "Brown bread" means dead; it is London rhyming slang ("bread" rhymes with "dead").
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 003-death-and-feeling-poorly.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): R2-punct-next ×1, R7-rel-agree ×2
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	Brown	brown	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	compound	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=3:amod
3	bread	bread	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	dead	dead	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	5	xcomp	_	_
7	;	;	PUNCT	:	_	12	punct	_	Agree=R2-punct-next|Haiku=5:punct
8	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
9	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	cop	_	_
10	London	London	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	12	compound	_	_
11	rhyming	rhyme	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	12	acl	_	_
12	slang	slang	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	parataxis	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=5:conj
13	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	17	punct	_	_
14	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	15	punct	_	_
15	bread	bread	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	17	nsubj	_	_
16	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	15	punct	_	_
17	rhymes	rhyme	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	parataxis	_	_
18	with	with	ADP	IN	_	20	case	_	_
19	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	20	punct	_	_
20	dead	dead	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	17	obl	_	_
21	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	20	punct	_	_
22	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	17	punct	_	_
23	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Brown bread |  |  |  |  | dead *property* | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **rhyme** | gerund | London slang *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn amalgamate-22.2-2-1 «NP V»: agent=Patient |
| 3 | **is a** | present | bread | London slang |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 4 | **rhyme** | present | bread |  |  |  |  | with dead | vn amalgamate-22.2-2-1 «NP V NP PP.co-patient»: agent=Agent with dead=Co-Patient |

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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:003-death-and-feeling-poorly.lesson:19`.

**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): R2-punct-next ×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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- ← previous: [Soft words for hard things: death and…, 18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/3-death-and-feeling-poorly/18/)
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