---
title: Staying silent about an unkind joke about a group of people can seem… — Standing up for yourself, nightmares and the dark · tree and pragmatics
description: Staying silent about an unkind joke about a group of people can seem like agreement. Who acts: Staying. 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 8

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Staying silent about an unkind joke about a group of people can seem like agreement.

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**Who acts:** Staying · **What happens:** stay, seem

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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 (Staying), 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:8
# text = Staying silent about an unkind joke about a group of people can seem like agreement.
# 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	Staying	stay	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	13	csubj	_	_
2	silent	silent	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	1	xcomp	_	_
3	about	about	ADP	IN	_	6	case	_	_
4	an	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	unkind	unkind	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
6	joke	joke	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	obl	_	_
7	about	about	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
8	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
9	group	group	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
10	of	of	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
11	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	nmod	_	_
12	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	13	aux	_	_
13	seem	seem	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
14	like	like	ADP	IN	_	15	case	_	_
15	agreement	agreement	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	13	obl	_	_
16	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	13	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 | **stay** | gerund |  |  |  |  |  | about a unkind joke about a group of people; silent *property* | vn exist-47.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme about joke=Location |
| 2 | **seem** | can | Staying |  |  |  |  | like agreement | vn seem-109-1-1-1 «NP V S\_INF»: 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:everyday:100-standing-up-nightmares-and-the-dark.lesson:8`.

**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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