---
title: "Needs improvement", on a school report, means the work is poor or f… — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes · tree and pragmatics
description: "Needs improvement", on a school report, means the work is poor or failing. Who acts: work. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes» 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: failure and mistakes, sentence 15

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
"Needs improvement", on a school report, means the work is poor or failing.

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**Who acts:** work · **What happens:** need, mean, be, fail · **To what, where:** improvement, school report · **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 (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:15
# text = "Needs improvement", on a school report, means the work is poor or failing.
# 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): R6-punct-agree ×2
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Needs	need	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	improvement	improvement	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=3:punct
5	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
6	on	on	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	school	school	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	compound	_	_
9	report	report	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obl	_	_
10	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	9	punct	_	_
11	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	2	parataxis	_	_
12	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
13	work	work	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	15	nsubj	_	_
14	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	15	cop	_	_
15	poor	poor	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	ccomp	_	_
16	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	17	cc	_	_
17	failing	fail	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	15	conj	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	11	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=2: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 | **need** *in a quote* | present |  | improvement |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **mean** | present |  |  |  | a school report |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **is** | present | the work |  |  |  |  | poor *property* | tree rules |
| 4 | **fail** | gerund | the work *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn succeed-74-3-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .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: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): R6-punct-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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