---
title: "Came a cropper" (UK) means failed badly or fell over. — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes · tree and pragmatics
description: "Came a cropper" (UK) means failed badly or fell over. 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 23

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"Came a cropper" (UK) means failed badly or fell over.

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**What happens:** come, mean, fail, fall · **To what, where:** cropper · **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: 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:23
# text = "Came a cropper" (UK) means failed badly or fell over.
# 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): R7-rel-agree ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Came	come	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	9	nsubj	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	cropper	cropper	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	_
6	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	7	punct	_	_
7	UK	UK	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	dep	_	_
8	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	7	punct	_	_
9	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
10	failed	fail	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	9	ccomp	_	_
11	badly	badly	ADV	RB	Degree=Pos	10	advmod	_	_
12	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	14	cc	_	_
13	fell	fall	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	10	conj	_	_
14	over	over	ADV	RB	_	13	advmod	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=13:compound:prt|HaikuPos=ADP:RP:_
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	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 | **come** *in a quote* | past |  | a cropper |  |  |  |  | vn appear-48.1.1 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location cropper=Theme |
| 2 | **mean** | present |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **fail** | participle |  |  |  |  |  | badly *property* | vn succeed-74-3-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 4 | **fall** | past |  |  |  |  |  | over *property* | vn occur-48.3 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

<!-- .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:23`.

**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): 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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