---
title: "A brick short of a load" (Australia) means stupid or a bit mad. — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes… · tree and pragmatics
description: "A brick short of a load" (Australia) means stupid or a bit mad. Who acts: brick short load. 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 cl
---

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# Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness, sentence 14

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"A brick short of a load" (Australia) means stupid or a bit mad.

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**Who acts:** brick short load · **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 (brick short load), 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:14
# text = "A brick short of a load" (Australia) means stupid or a bit mad.
# 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): R5-strong ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	7	punct	_	_
2	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=7:det
3	brick	brick	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
4	short	short	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	7	amod	_	_
5	of	of	ADP	IN	_	7	case	_	_
6	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	load	load	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
8	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	7	punct	_	_
9	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	10	punct	_	_
10	Australia	Australia	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	7	dep	_	_
11	)	)	PUNCT	-RRB-	_	10	punct	_	_
12	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
13	stupid	stupid	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	xcomp	_	_
14	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	17	cc	_	_
15	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	16	det	_	_
16	bit	bit	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	17	obl:unmarked	_	_
17	mad	mad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	conj	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	12	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 | a brick short load |  |  |  |  | stupid *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:14`.

**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): R5-strong ×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…, 13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/35-mistakes-and-stupidity/13/)
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