---
title: "A real character" is a polite way to call someone odd, unusual or d… — Soft words for hard things: stupidity and madness · tree and pragmatics
description: "A real character" is a polite way to call someone odd, unusual or difficult. Who acts: real character. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: 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: stupidity and madness, sentence 22

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"A real character" is a polite way to call someone odd, unusual or difficult.

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**Who acts:** real character · **What happens:** be, call · **To what, where:** polite way, someone · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: 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 (real character), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:036-dim-and-round-the-bend.lesson:22
# text = "A real character" is a polite way to call someone odd, unusual or difficult.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 036-dim-and-round-the-bend.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	``	_	9	punct	_	_
2	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
3	real	real	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	4	amod	_	_
4	character	character	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	cop	_	_
7	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
8	polite	polite	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	way	way	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
10	to	to	PART	TO	_	11	mark	_	_
11	call	call	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	9	acl	_	_
12	someone	someone	PRON	NN	Number=Sing|PronType=Ind	11	obj	_	_
13	odd	odd	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	xcomp	_	_
14	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	15	punct	_	_
15	unusual	unusual	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	conj	_	_
16	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	17	cc	_	_
17	difficult	difficult	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	conj	_	_
18	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	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 | **is a** | present | a real character | a polite way |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **call** | to-infinitive |  |  | someone |  |  | odd *property* | vn initiate\_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent someone=Recipient |

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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:036-dim-and-round-the-bend.lesson:22`.

**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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