---
title: Fear of being punished is the most common reason people lie. — Why people lie, and what is not a lie · tree and pragmatics
description: Fear of being punished is the most common reason people lie. Who acts: Fear, people. A sentence of the lesson «Why people lie, and what is not a lie» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Why people lie, and what is not a lie, sentence 9

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Fear of being punished is the most common reason people lie.

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**Who acts:** Fear, people · **What happens:** punish, be, lie · **To what, where:** Fear, common reason

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Why people lie, and what is not a lie» 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 (Fear, people), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:195-why-people-lie.lesson:9
# text = Fear of being punished is the most common reason people lie.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 195-why-people-lie.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	Fear	fear	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	nsubj	_	_
2	of	of	SCONJ	IN	_	4	mark	_	_
3	being	be	AUX	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	4	aux:pass	_	_
4	punished	punish	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	1	acl	_	_
5	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	cop	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	9	det	_	_
7	most	most	ADV	RBS	Degree=Sup	8	advmod	_	_
8	common	common	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	9	amod	_	_
9	reason	reason	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
10	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	11	nsubj	_	_
11	lie	lie	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	acl:relcl	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: changed act=assert, polarity=none

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **punish** | gerund · passive |  | Fear *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn prosecute-33.2-1 «NP V NP» |
| 2 | **is a** | present | Fear | the common reason |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 3 | **lie** | present | people | the common reason *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn spatial\_configuration-47.6 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location reason=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:195-why-people-lie.lesson:9`.

**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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- ← previous: [Why people lie, and what is not a lie, 7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/195-why-people-lie/7/)
- next →: [Why people lie, and what is not a lie, 10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/195-why-people-lie/10/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/195-why-people-lie/)