---
title: "Thinning on top" is a polite way to say going bald. — Soft words for hard things: age and looks and we… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Thinning on top" is a polite way to say going bald. Who acts: Thinning. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: age and looks and weight» 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: age and looks and weight, sentence 11

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"Thinning on top" is a polite way to say going bald.

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**Who acts:** Thinning · **What happens:** thin, be, say, go · **To what, where:** top, polite way · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:009-age-looks-and-size.lesson:11
# text = "Thinning on top" is a polite way to say going bald.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 009-age-looks-and-size.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	``	_	2	punct	_	_
2	Thinning	thin	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	9	csubj	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=9:nsubj|HaikuPos=NOUN:NN:Number=Sing
3	on	on	ADP	IN	_	4	case	_	_
4	top	top	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obl	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=2:nmod
5	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	2	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	say	say	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	9	acl	_	_
12	going	go	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	11	xcomp	_	_
13	bald	bald	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	12	xcomp	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	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 | **thin** *in a quote* | gerund |  |  |  | top |  |  | vn other\_cos-45.4 «NP.patient V»: agent=Patient |
| 2 | **is a** | present | Thinning | a polite way |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **say** *speech: assert* | to-infinitive |  |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 4 | **go** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  | bald *property* | vn disappearance-48.2-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme |

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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:009-age-looks-and-size.lesson:11`.

**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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