---
title: "Back to the drawing board" means the plan has failed and we must st… — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes · tree and pragmatics
description: "Back to the drawing board" means the plan has failed and we must start again. Who acts: drawing board, plan, we. 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 11

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"Back to the drawing board" means the plan has failed and we must start again.

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**Who acts:** drawing board, plan, we · **What happens:** mean, fail, start · **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 (drawing board, plan, we), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:034-failure-and-mistakes.lesson:11
# text = "Back to the drawing board" means the plan has failed and we must start again.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 034-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): R1-cc-next ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	_
2	Back	back	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
3	to	to	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
4	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	drawing	drawing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	_
6	board	board	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	8	nsubj	_	_
7	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
8	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	plan	plan	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
11	has	have	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
12	failed	fail	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part	8	ccomp	_	_
13	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	16	cc	_	Agree=R1-cc-next|Haiku=12:cc
14	we	we	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=1|PronType=Prs	16	nsubj	_	_
15	must	must	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	16	aux	_	_
16	start	start	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	12	conj	_	_
17	again	again	ADV	RB	_	16	advmod	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | the drawing board |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **fail** | present · perfect | the plan |  |  |  |  |  | vn succeed-74-3-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **start** | must | we |  |  |  | again |  | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality |

<!-- .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:034-failure-and-mistakes.lesson:11`.

**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): R1-cc-next ×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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