---
title: Teachers and bosses use gentle words to be kind, such as "room for i… — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes · tree and pragmatics
description: Teachers and bosses use gentle words to be kind, such as "room for improvement" on a school report, which really means the work is poor. Who acts: Teachers, room, work. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with 
---

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# Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes, sentence 1

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Teachers and bosses use gentle words to be kind, such as "room for improvement" on a school report, which really means the work is poor.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Teachers, room, work · **What happens:** use, be, mean · **To what, where:** gentle words · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes» 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 (Teachers, room, work), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:033-failure-and-mistakes.lesson:1
# text = Teachers and bosses use gentle words to be kind, such as "room for improvement" on a school report, which really means the work is poor.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 033-failure-and-mistakes.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	Teachers	teacher	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
2	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	3	cc	_	_
3	bosses	boss	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	1	conj	_	_
4	use	use	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	gentle	gentle	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	words	word	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	obj	_	_
7	to	to	PART	TO	_	9	mark	_	_
8	be	be	AUX	VB	VerbForm=Inf	9	cop	_	_
9	kind	kind	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	advcl	_	_
10	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	14	punct	_	_
11	such	such	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos|ExtPos=ADP	14	case	_	_
12	as	as	ADP	IN	_	11	fixed	_	_
13	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	14	punct	_	_
14	room	room	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	parataxis	_	_
15	for	for	ADP	IN	_	16	case	_	_
16	improvement	improvement	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	nmod	_	_
17	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	14	punct	_	_
18	on	on	ADP	IN	_	21	case	_	_
19	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	21	det	_	_
20	school	school	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	21	compound	_	_
21	report	report	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	nmod	_	_
22	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	25	punct	_	_
23	which	which	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	25	nsubj	_	_
24	really	really	ADV	RB	_	25	advmod	_	_
25	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	14	acl:relcl	_	_
26	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	27	det	_	_
27	work	work	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	29	nsubj	_	_
28	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	29	cop	_	_
29	poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	25	ccomp	_	_
30	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	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 | **use** | present | Teachers and bosses | gentle words |  |  |  |  | vn use-105.1 «NP V NP S\_INF»: agent=Agent word=Theme clause=Eventuality |
| 2 | **is** | to-infinitive | Teachers and bosses *not said here* |  |  |  |  | kind *property* | tree rules |
| 3 | **mean** | present | room for improvement on a school report |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **is** | present | the work |  |  |  |  | poor *property* | tree rules |

<!-- .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:033-failure-and-mistakes.lesson:1`.

**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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