---
title: Calm words work better than pushing back. — Standing up for yourself, nightmares and the dark · tree and pragmatics
description: Calm words work better than pushing back. Who acts: Calm words. A sentence of the lesson «Standing up for yourself, nightmares and the dark» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Standing up for yourself, nightmares and the dark, sentence 6

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Calm words work better than pushing back.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** Calm words · **What happens:** work, push back

<!-- .vabout -->
This is a sentence of the lesson «Standing up for yourself, nightmares and the dark» of the everyday 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 (Calm words), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:100-standing-up-nightmares-and-the-dark.lesson:6
# text = Calm words work better than pushing back.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 100-standing-up-nightmares-and-the-dark.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	Calm	calm	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	amod	_	_
2	words	word	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nsubj	_	_
3	work	work	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	better	well	ADV	RBR	Degree=Cmp	3	advmod	_	_
5	than	than	SCONJ	IN	_	6	mark	_	_
6	pushing	push	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	4	advcl	_	_
7	back	back	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
8	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- sa -->
- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **work** | present | Calm words |  |  |  |  | well *property* | vn employment-95.3 «NP V»: agent=Agent |
| 2 | **push back** | gerund | Calm words *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn push-12-1-1 «NP V PP»: agent=Agent |

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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:everyday:100-standing-up-nightmares-and-the-dark.lesson:6`.

**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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