---
title: Teachers sometimes use sarcasm to tease gently, but it can hurt, and… — Sarcasm and tone of voice · tree and pragmatics
description: Teachers sometimes use sarcasm to tease gently, but it can hurt, and many teachers now avoid it with children. Who acts: Teachers, right, many teachers. A sentence of the lesson «Sarcasm and tone of voice» of the language course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of
---

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# Sarcasm and tone of voice, sentence 11

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
Teachers sometimes use sarcasm to tease gently, but it can hurt, and many teachers now avoid it with children.

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**Who acts:** Teachers, right, many teachers · **What happens:** use, tease, hurt, avoid · **To what, where:** sarcasm, right

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Sarcasm and tone of voice» of the language 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 (Teachers, right, many teachers), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:language:029-sarcasm-and-tone-of-voice.lesson:11
# text = Teachers sometimes use sarcasm to tease gently, but it can hurt, and many teachers now avoid it with children.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = language
# lesson = 029-sarcasm-and-tone-of-voice.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, R8-pos-agree ×1
1	Teachers	teacher	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	3	nsubj	_	_
2	sometimes	sometimes	ADV	RB	PronType=Ind	3	advmod	_	_
3	use	use	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
4	sarcasm	sarcasm	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	3	obj	_	_
5	to	to	PART	TO	_	6	mark	_	_
6	tease	tease	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	advcl	_	_
7	gently	gently	ADV	RB	_	6	advmod	_	_
8	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	12	punct	_	_
9	but	but	CCONJ	CC	_	12	cc	_	_
10	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	12	nsubj	_	_
11	can	can	AUX	MD	VerbForm=Fin	12	aux	_	_
12	hurt	hurt	VERB	VB	VerbForm=Inf	3	conj	_	Agree=R5-strong|Haiku=6:conj
13	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	18	punct	_	_
14	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	18	cc	_	_
15	many	many	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	16	amod	_	_
16	teachers	teacher	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	18	nsubj	_	_
17	now	now	ADV	RB	PronType=Dem	18	advmod	_	_
18	avoid	avoid	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	3	conj	_	Agree=R8-pos-agree|Haiku=3:conj|HaikuPos=VERB:VB:VerbForm=Inf
19	it	it	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	18	obj	_	_
20	with	with	ADP	IN	_	21	case	_	_
21	children	child	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	18	obl	_	_
22	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	3	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **use** | present | Teachers | sarcasm |  |  |  | sometimes *property* | vn eat-39.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent sarcasm=Patient |
| 2 | **tease** | to-infinitive | Teachers *not said here* |  |  |  |  | gently *property* | vn ferret-35.6 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent |
| 3 | **hurt** | can | right |  |  |  |  |  | vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP-PRO-ARB»: agent=Stimulus |
| 4 | **avoid** | present | many teachers | right |  |  | now | with children | vn avoid-52 «NP V NP.location»: agent=Agent it=Location |

<!-- .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:language:029-sarcasm-and-tone-of-voice.lesson:11`.

**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, R8-pos-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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