---
title: "Not the brightest bulb" (US) means not very clever. — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Not the brightest bulb" (US) means not very clever. Who acts: brightest bulb. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness» 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 and stupidity and madness, sentence 12

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"Not the brightest bulb" (US) means not very clever.

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**Who acts:** brightest bulb · **What happens:** mean

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:035-mistakes-and-stupidity.lesson:12
# text = "Not the brightest bulb" (US) means not very clever.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 035-mistakes-and-stupidity.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 ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	_
2	Not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	brightest	bright	ADJ	JJS	Degree=Sup	5	amod	_	_
5	bulb	bulb	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
6	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=10:punct
7	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	8	punct	_	_
8	US	US	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	5	appos	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=5:parataxis
9	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	8	punct	_	_
10	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
11	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	13	advmod	_	_
12	very	very	ADV	RB	_	13	advmod	_	_
13	clever	clever	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	xcomp	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | the brightest bulb |  |  |  |  | clever *property* | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |

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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:035-mistakes-and-stupidity.lesson:12`.

**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 ×1, 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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- ← previous: [Soft words for hard things: failure an…, 11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/35-mistakes-and-stupidity/11/)
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