---
title: Prank calls can scare or annoy people, especially older people livin… — Pranks: harmless fun or real harm? · tree and pragmatics
description: Prank calls can scare or annoy people, especially older people living alone. Who acts: Prank calls, older people. A sentence of the lesson «Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?, sentence 21

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Prank calls can scare or annoy people, especially older people living alone.

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**Who acts:** Prank calls, older people · **What happens:** scare, annoy, live · **To what, where:** people

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?» 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 (Prank calls, older people), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:204-pranks.lesson:21
# text = Prank calls can scare or annoy people, especially older people living alone.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 204-pranks.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): R5-strong ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1
1	Prank	prank	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	compound	_	_
2	calls	call	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
3	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	4	aux	_	_
4	scare	scare	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	0	root	_	_
5	or	or	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	annoy	annoy	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	4	conj	_	_
7	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	obj	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	11	punct	_	_
9	especially	especially	ADV	RB	_	11	advmod	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=10:advmod
10	older	old	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	11	amod	_	_
11	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	appos	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=7:conj
12	living	live	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	11	acl	_	_
13	alone	alone	ADV	RB	_	12	advmod	_	_
14	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	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 | **scare** | can | Prank calls |  |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V ADV-Middle»: agent=Experiencer |
| 2 | **annoy** | infinitive | Prank calls *not said here* | people |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus people=Experiencer |
| 3 | **live** | gerund | older people *not said here* |  |  |  |  | alone *property* | vn exist-47.1-1 «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:everyday:204-pranks.lesson:21`.

**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): R5-strong ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1. **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: [Pranks: harmless fun or real harm?, 20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/204-pranks/20/)
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- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/204-pranks/)