---
title: "Colourful language" means swearing; it is a British polite phrase. — Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing · tree and pragmatics
description: "Colourful language" means swearing; it is a British polite phrase. Who acts: Colourful language, language. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: rudeness and swearing» 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: rudeness and swearing, sentence 19

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"Colourful language" means swearing; it is a British polite phrase.

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**Who acts:** Colourful language, language · **What happens:** mean, be · **To what, where:** swearing, British polite phrase

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:039-pardon-my-french.lesson:19
# text = "Colourful language" means swearing; it is a British polite phrase.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 039-pardon-my-french.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): R7-rel-agree ×2
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	3	punct	_	_
2	Colourful	colourful	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	language	language	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nsubj	_	_
4	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	3	punct	_	_
5	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
6	swearing	swearing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	obj	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=5:ccomp|HaikuPos=VERB:VBG:VerbForm=Ger
7	;	;	PUNCT	:	_	5	punct	_	_
8	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	13	nsubj	_	_
9	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	13	cop	_	_
10	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	13	det	_	_
11	British	British	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	_
12	polite	polite	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	amod	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=13:compound|HaikuPos=NOUN:NN:Number=Sing
13	phrase	phrase	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	parataxis	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	5	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Colourful language | swearing |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent swearing=Topic |
| 2 | **is a** | present | language | a British polite phrase |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

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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:039-pardon-my-french.lesson:19`.

**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): R7-rel-agree ×2. **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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