---
title: Bullies often stop when the person they pick on is not alone. — Standing by a friend · tree and pragmatics
description: Bullies often stop when the person they pick on is not alone. Who acts: Bullies, person. A sentence of the lesson «Standing by a friend» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Standing by a friend, sentence 23

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Bullies often stop when the person they pick on is not alone.

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**Who acts:** Bullies, person · **What happens:** stop, pick on, not be · **To what, where:** person

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Standing by a friend» 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 (Bullies, person), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:370-standing-by-a-friend.lesson:23
# text = Bullies often stop when the person they pick on is not alone.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 370-standing-by-a-friend.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	Bullies	bully	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nsubj	_	_
2	often	often	ADV	RB	_	3	advmod	_	_
3	stop	stop	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	when	when	SCONJ	WRB	_	12	mark	_	_
5	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
6	person	person	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
7	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	8	nsubj	_	_
8	pick	pick	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	acl:relcl	_	_
9	on	on	ADP	RP	_	8	compound:prt	_	_
10	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	cop	_	_
11	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	12	advmod	_	_
12	alone	alone	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	advcl	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **stop** | present | Bullies |  |  |  |  | often *property* | vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality |
| 2 | **pick on** | present | Bullies *= bully* | the person *not said here* |  |  |  |  | vn chew-39.2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent person=Patient |
| 3 | **not** **is** | present | the person |  |  |  |  | alone *property* | tree rules |

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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:370-standing-by-a-friend.lesson:23`.

**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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