---
title: A straw man is a scarecrow version of what your opponent said. — The politician's either-or and the straw man · tree and pragmatics
description: A straw man is a scarecrow version of what your opponent said. Who acts: straw man, opponent. A sentence of the lesson «The politician's either-or and the straw man» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# The politician's either-or and the straw man, sentence 2

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A straw man is a scarecrow version of what your opponent said.

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**Who acts:** straw man, opponent · **What happens:** be, say · **To what, where:** scarecrow version · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «The politician's either-or and the straw man» of the world 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 (straw man, opponent), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:178-the-politicians-either-or-and-the-straw-man.lesson:2
# text = A straw man is a scarecrow version of what your opponent said.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 178-the-politicians-either-or-and-the-straw-man.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	A	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
2	straw	straw	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	3	amod	_	_
3	man	man	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	nsubj	_	_
4	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
5	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
6	scarecrow	scarecrow	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	compound	_	_
7	version	version	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
8	of	of	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	what	what	PRON	WP	PronType=Rel	7	nmod	_	_
10	your	your	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Person=2|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	11	nmod:poss	_	_
11	opponent	opponent	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
12	said	say	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	9	acl:relcl	_	_
13	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	7	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 | **is a** | present | a straw man | a scarecrow version |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **say** *speech: assert* | past | your opponent |  |  |  |  |  | vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent |

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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:world:178-the-politicians-either-or-and-the-straw-man.lesson:2`.

**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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