---
title: "Lost his marbles" means gone mad or very confused. — Soft words for hard things: stupidity and madness · tree and pragmatics
description: "Lost his marbles" means gone mad or very confused. 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 24

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"Lost his marbles" means gone mad or very confused.

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**What happens:** lose, mean · **To what, where:** marbles, gone mad · **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: 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:24
# text = "Lost his marbles" means gone mad or very confused.
# 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): R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Lost	lose	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	6	csubj	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=6:nsubj|HaikuPos=VERB:VBD:Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin
3	his	his	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	4	nmod:poss	_	_
4	marbles	marble	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	obj	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=4:punct
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	gone	gone	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	amod	_	_
8	mad	mad	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	obj	_	_
9	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	11	cc	_	_
10	very	very	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	_
11	confused	confused	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	8	conj	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	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 | **lose** *in a quote* | participle |  | person's marbles |  |  |  |  | vn succeed-74-3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent marble=Eventuality |
| 2 | **mean** | present |  | gone mad |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent mad=Topic |

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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:24`.

**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: stupidity…, 23](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/36-dim-and-round-the-bend/23/)
- next →: [Soft words for hard things: stupidity…, 1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/euphemisms/37-bats-and-gosh/1/)
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