---
title: "Not exactly a rocket scientist" is a joke meaning not clever. — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Not exactly a rocket scientist" is a joke meaning not clever. Who acts: rocket scientist, joke. 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 ever
---

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# Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness, sentence 23

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"Not exactly a rocket scientist" is a joke meaning not clever.

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**Who acts:** rocket scientist, joke · **What happens:** be, mean · **To what, where:** joke

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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 (rocket scientist, joke), 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:23
# text = "Not exactly a rocket scientist" is a joke meaning not 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): no change
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	6	punct	_	_
2	Not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	6	advmod	_	_
3	exactly	exactly	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	rocket	rocket	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	_
6	scientist	scientist	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
7	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	6	punct	_	_
8	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	10	cop	_	_
9	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	joke	joke	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
11	meaning	mean	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	10	acl	_	_
12	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	13	advmod	_	_
13	clever	clever	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	xcomp	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	10	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | a rocket scientist | a joke |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **mean** | gerund | a joke *not said here* |  |  |  |  | clever *property* | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .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:035-mistakes-and-stupidity.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): 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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