---
title: Misdirection means steering people's attention away from the secret… — April Fools' Day and how magic tricks work · tree and pragmatics
description: Misdirection means steering people's attention away from the secret move. Who acts: Misdirection, people. A sentence of the lesson «April Fools' Day and how magic tricks work» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# April Fools' Day and how magic tricks work, sentence 21

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Misdirection means steering people's attention away from the secret move.

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**Who acts:** Misdirection, people · **What happens:** mean, steer, attend · **To what, where:** attention

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This is a sentence of the lesson «April Fools' Day and how magic tricks work» 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 (Misdirection, people), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:279-april-fools-and-magic-tricks.lesson:21
# text = Misdirection means steering people's attention away from the secret move.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 279-april-fools-and-magic-tricks.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	Misdirection	misdirection	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	means	mean	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	steering	steer	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	2	xcomp	_	_
4	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	6	nmod:poss	_	_
5	's	's	PART	POS	_	4	case	_	_
6	attention	attention	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
7	away	away	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
8	from	from	ADP	IN	_	11	case	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	11	det	_	_
10	secret	secret	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	11	amod	_	_
11	move	move	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obl	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **mean** | present | Misdirection |  |  |  |  |  | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic |
| 2 | **steer** *not said to happen* | gerund | Misdirection *not said here* | people's attention |  |  |  | away *property* | vn accompany-51.7 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent attention=Theme |
| 3 | **attend** |  | people |  |  |  |  |  | nom attention «cognition intransitive»: poss=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:279-april-fools-and-magic-tricks.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): 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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