---
title: A placebo is a dummy treatment with no active medicine; people somet… — How medicines work · tree and pragmatics
description: A placebo is a dummy treatment with no active medicine; people sometimes feel better just because they expect to. Who acts: placebo, people, medicine. A sentence of the lesson «How medicines work» of the medicine course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every cl
---

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# How medicines work, sentence 13

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A placebo is a dummy treatment with no active medicine; people sometimes feel better just because they expect to.

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**Who acts:** placebo, people, medicine · **What happens:** be, feel, expect · **To what, where:** dummy treatment

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This is a sentence of the lesson «How medicines work» of the medicine 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 (placebo, people, medicine), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:medicine:017-how-medicines-work.lesson:13
# text = A placebo is a dummy treatment with no active medicine; people sometimes feel better just because they expect to.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = medicine
# lesson = 017-how-medicines-work.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): R7-rel-agree ×2
1	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	2	det	_	_
2	placebo	placebo	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nsubj	_	_
3	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
4	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	6	det	_	_
5	dummy	dummy	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	compound	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=6:amod|HaikuPos=ADJ:JJ:Degree=Pos
6	treatment	treatment	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
7	with	with	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
8	no	no	DET	DT	PronType=Neg	10	det	_	_
9	active	active	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	medicine	medicine	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	nmod	_	_
11	;	;	PUNCT	,	_	6	punct	_	_
12	people	people	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	14	nsubj	_	_
13	sometimes	sometimes	ADV	RB	PronType=Ind	14	advmod	_	_
14	feel	feel	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	parataxis	_	_
15	better	good	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	14	xcomp	_	_
16	just	just	ADV	RB	_	19	advmod	_	_
17	because	because	SCONJ	IN	_	19	mark	_	_
18	they	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Nom|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	19	nsubj	_	_
19	expect	expect	VERB	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	14	advcl	_	_
20	to	to	PART	TO	_	19	xcomp	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=19:mark
21	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	6	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | a placebo | a dummy treatment |  |  |  | with no active medicine | tree rules |
| 2 | **feel** | present | people |  |  |  |  | good, sometimes *property* | vn stimulus\_subject-30.4 «NP V ADJ»: agent=Stimulus |
| 3 | **expect** | present | medicine |  |  |  |  |  | vn conjecture-29.5-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |

<!-- .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:medicine:017-how-medicines-work.lesson:13`.

**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): R7-rel-agree ×2. **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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