---
title: Attacking the person instead of the claim is called ad hominem. — Check the claim, not the person · tree and pragmatics
description: Attacking the person instead of the claim is called ad hominem. Who acts: Attacking. A sentence of the lesson «Check the claim, not the person» of the world course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Check the claim, not the person, sentence 12

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Attacking the person instead of the claim is called ad hominem.

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**Who acts:** Attacking · **What happens:** attack, call · **To what, where:** person, ad hominem · **Speech:** someone speaks here

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Check the claim, not the person» 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 (Attacking), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:world:188-check-the-claim-not-the-person.lesson:12
# text = Attacking the person instead of the claim is called ad hominem.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = world
# lesson = 188-check-the-claim-not-the-person.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 ×1
1	Attacking	attack	VERB	VBG	Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Part	9	csubj:pass	_	Agree=R7-rel-agree|Haiku=9:advcl
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	person	person	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	obj	_	_
4	instead	instead	ADV	RB	ExtPos=ADP	7	case	_	_
5	of	of	ADP	IN	_	4	fixed	_	_
6	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	7	det	_	_
7	claim	claim	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	1	obl	_	_
8	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	9	aux:pass	_	_
9	called	call	VERB	VBN	Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part|Voice=Pass	0	root	_	_
10	ad	ad	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	11	compound	_	_
11	hominem	hominem	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	9	xcomp	_	_
12	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	9	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **attack** | gerund |  | the person |  |  |  | instead the claim | vn attack-60.1-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent person=Patient |
| 2 | **call** *speech: assert* | present · passive | Attacking | ad hominem |  |  |  |  | vn initiate\_communication-37.4.2-1 «NP V» |

<!-- .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:world:188-check-the-claim-not-the-person.lesson:12`.

**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 ×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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