---
title: "Under the knife" means having surgery. — Soft words for hard things: illness, disability… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Under the knife" means having surgery. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: illness, disability and the body» 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: illness, disability and the body, sentence 14

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"Under the knife" means having surgery.

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**What happens:** mean, have · **To what, where:** knife, surgery

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: illness, disability and the body» 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:005-drink-mind-and-body.lesson:14
# text = "Under the knife" means having surgery.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 005-drink-mind-and-body.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	Under	under	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	4	det	_	_
4	knife	knife	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obl	_	_
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	4	punct	_	_
6	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
7	having	have	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	6	xcomp	_	_
8	surgery	surgery	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obj	_	_
9	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present |  |  |  | the knife |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **have** *not said to happen* | gerund |  | surgery |  |  |  |  | vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent surgery=Patient |

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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:005-drink-mind-and-body.lesson:14`.

**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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