---
title: Small excuses repeated become a habit that people stop believing. — When someone else takes your punishment · tree and pragmatics
description: Small excuses repeated become a habit that people stop believing. Who acts: Small excuses, people. A sentence of the lesson «When someone else takes your punishment» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# When someone else takes your punishment, sentence 20

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Small excuses repeated become a habit that people stop believing.

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**Who acts:** Small excuses, people · **What happens:** repeat, become, stop, believe · **To what, where:** Small excuses, habit

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This is a sentence of the lesson «When someone else takes your punishment» 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 (Small excuses, people), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:345-when-someone-else-takes-your-punishment.lesson:20
# text = Small excuses repeated become a habit that people stop believing.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 345-when-someone-else-takes-your-punishment.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	Small	small	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	amod	_	_
2	excuses	excuse	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
3	repeated	repeat	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	2	acl	_	_
4	become	become	VERB	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	habit	habit	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	xcomp	_	_
7	that	that	PRON	WDT	PronType=Rel	9	obj	_	_
8	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	9	nsubj	_	_
9	stop	stop	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	acl	_	_
10	believing	believe	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	9	xcomp	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
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 | **repeat** | participle |  | Small excuses *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn begin-55.1-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality |
| 2 | **become** | present | Small excuses | a habit |  |  |  |  | vn become-109.1-1-1 «NP V PP.attribute»: agent=Patient |
| 3 | **stop** | present | people | a habit |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 4 | **believe** | gerund | people *not said here* |  |  |  |  |  | vn admire-31.2 «NP V that S»: agent=Experiencer |

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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:345-when-someone-else-takes-your-punishment.lesson:20`.

**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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