---
title: Prank calls and fake-crime pranks frighten real people who don't kno… — Cruel pranks and where the line is · tree and pragmatics
description: Prank calls and fake-crime pranks frighten real people who don't know it's a joke. Who acts: Prank calls, real people, target. A sentence of the lesson «Cruel pranks and where the line is» of the everyday course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Cruel pranks and where the line is, sentence 40

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Prank calls and fake-crime pranks frighten real people who don't know it's a joke.

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**Who acts:** Prank calls, real people, target · **What happens:** frighten, not know, be · **To what, where:** real people, joke · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Cruel pranks and where the line is» 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, real people, target), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:everyday:439-cruel-pranks-and-where-the-line-is.lesson:40
# text = Prank calls and fake-crime pranks frighten real people who don't know it's a joke.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = everyday
# lesson = 439-cruel-pranks-and-where-the-line-is.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	Prank	prank	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	compound	_	_
2	calls	call	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	nsubj	_	_
3	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	7	cc	_	_
4	fake	fake	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	6	amod	_	_
5	-	-	PUNCT	HYPH	_	4	punct	_	_
6	crime	crime	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	compound	_	_
7	pranks	prank	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	2	conj	_	_
8	frighten	frighten	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
9	real	real	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	8	obj	_	_
11	who	who	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	14	nsubj	_	_
12	do	do	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	14	aux	_	_
13	n't	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	14	advmod	_	_
14	know	know	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	10	acl:relcl	_	_
15	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	18	nsubj	_	_
16	's	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	18	cop	_	_
17	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	18	det	_	_
18	joke	joke	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	14	ccomp	_	_
19	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	8	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 | **frighten** | present | Prank calls and crime pranks | real people |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus people=Experiencer |
| 2 | **not** **know** | present · do-support | real people |  |  |  |  |  | vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V»: agent=Experiencer |
| 3 | **is a** | present | target | a joke |  |  |  |  | tree rules |

<!-- .note -->
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:439-cruel-pranks-and-where-the-line-is.lesson:40`.

**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: [Cruel pranks and where the line is, 39](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/439-cruel-pranks-and-where-the-line-is/39/)
- next →: [Cruel pranks and where the line is, 41](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/439-cruel-pranks-and-where-the-line-is/41/)
- ↑ back to [the lesson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/439-cruel-pranks-and-where-the-line-is/)