---
title: "A teachable moment" (US jargon) means a mistake to learn from. — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes… · tree and pragmatics
description: "A teachable moment" (US jargon) means a mistake to learn from. Who acts: teachable moment. 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 cla
---

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# Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness, sentence 5

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"A teachable moment" (US jargon) means a mistake to learn from.

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**Who acts:** teachable moment · **What happens:** mean, learn · **To what, where:** mistake

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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 (teachable moment), 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:5
# text = "A teachable moment" (US jargon) means a mistake to learn from.
# 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
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	4	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=10:punct
2	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	teachable	teachable	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	moment	moment	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nsubj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	(	(	PUNCT	-LRB-	_	8	punct	_	_
7	US	US	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	8	compound	_	_
8	jargon	jargon	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	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	mistake	mistake	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	obj	_	_
13	to	to	PART	TO	_	14	mark	_	_
14	learn	learn	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	12	acl	_	_
15	from	from	ADV	RB	_	14	advmod	_	_
16	.	.	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 | **mean** | present | a teachable moment | a mistake |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent mistake=Topic |
| 2 | **learn** | to-infinitive | a teachable moment *not said here* | a mistake *not said here* |  |  |  | from *property* | vn learn-14-1 «NP V»: 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: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): R6-punct-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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