---
title: "The dearly departed" means the dead; it is polite and is sometimes… — Soft words for hard things: death and dying, ill… · tree and pragmatics
description: "The dearly departed" means the dead; it is polite and is sometimes used jokingly. Who acts: departed, sleep. 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 the pragmatics of 
---

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# Soft words for hard things: death and dying, illness and the body, sentence 8

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"The dearly departed" means the dead; it is polite and is sometimes used jokingly.

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**Who acts:** departed, sleep · **What happens:** mean, be, use · **To what, where:** dead

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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 (departed, sleep), 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:8
# text = "The dearly departed" means the dead; it is polite and is sometimes used jokingly.
# 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): no change
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	_
2	The	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	dearly	dearly	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	4	advmod	_	_
4	departed	depart	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	nsubj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	dead	dead	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	obj	_	_
9	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
10	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
11	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	cop	_	_
12	polite	polite	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	parataxis	_	_
13	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	_
14	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	16	aux:pass	_	_
15	sometimes	sometimes	ADV	RB	PronType=Ind	16	advmod	_	_
16	used	use	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	12	conj	_	_
17	jokingly	jokingly	ADV	RB	_	16	advmod	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	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 | the departed | the dead |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent dead=Topic |
| 2 | **is** | present | sleep |  |  |  |  | polite *property* | tree rules |
| 3 | **use** | present · passive | sleep *not said here* |  |  |  |  | jokingly, sometimes *property* | vn eat-39.1 «NP V» |

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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:8`.

**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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- ← previous: [Soft words for hard things: death and…, 7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/3-death-and-feeling-poorly/7/)
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- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/3-death-and-feeling-poorly/)