---
title: "Dropped a clanger" (UK slang) means made an embarrassing mistake. — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes · tree and pragmatics
description: "Dropped a clanger" (UK slang) means made an embarrassing mistake. 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 5

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"Dropped a clanger" (UK slang) means made an embarrassing mistake.

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**What happens:** drop, mean, make · **To what, where:** clanger, embarrassing mistake · **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:034-failure-and-mistakes.lesson:5
# text = "Dropped a clanger" (UK slang) means made an embarrassing mistake.
# 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): no change
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Dropped	drop	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	10	csubj	_	_
3	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	clanger	clanger	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	8	punct	_	_
7	UK	UK	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	compound	_	_
8	slang	slang	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	appos	_	_
9	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	8	punct	_	_
10	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	made	make	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	10	ccomp	_	_
12	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	14	det	_	_
13	embarrassing	embarrassing	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	14	amod	_	_
14	mistake	mistake	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	obj	_	_
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: changed act=assert

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **drop** *in a quote* | past |  | a clanger |  |  |  |  | vn put\_direction-9.4 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent clanger=Theme |
| 2 | **mean** | present |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 3 | **make** | participle |  | a embarrassing mistake |  |  |  |  | vn build-26.1-1 «NP.asset V NP»: agent=Asset mistake=Product |

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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:034-failure-and-mistakes.lesson:5`.

**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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