The Schema Inventory

Every schema in this layer ultimately traces back to one of the two primitives introduced in the Introduction: region, any concept whatever, and link, a force manifested between two regions. Everything else is a named, specific structure built on top of them — organized here by family, from the most general to the most specific.

The two roots#

Region carries a single element, the concept itself, and nothing else — it's deliberately left with no internal structure, because giving it one would smuggle in exactly the kind of distance-based, metric content this layer avoids.

Link carries two slots, conventionally called Relatum1 and Relatum2 — the two regions a force holds between. A bare link, with no more specific relation named, simply asserts that some tie holds. Every other relational structure in this layer, from a simple part-whole tie to the full machinery of a transformation, specializes link by taking its two slots and building something more specific on top of them.

Organizing regions: the dimension family#

A dimension is a region that organizes other regions — the way a scale organizes the temperatures on it, or a category organizes its members. Whether something counts as "a dimension" or "a region within it" isn't fixed in advance; it's a role a particular construal assigns. COLOR can be read as a dimension organizing BLUE and RED, or as a region within the larger dimension PHYSICAL_PROPERTIES — neither reading is more correct than the other.

A bare dimension has only one element — the organized region itself — because how a dimension organizes its members is exactly what each of the following children adds:

Axis#

Regions held in sequence around a distinguished origin: a center, and two opposed poles. An axis is purely ordinal — it records which side of center something falls on, and in what sequence, but never a distance. Ele está entre os dois extremos ("he's between the two extremes") reads directly against this shape.

Three further schemas each pin down what that opposition means, without adding any new element:

• Scale — the ordering carries a measurable criterion: quantity. This is what grounds ordinary comparison, "more" and "less" (mais alto, menos caro).
• Polarity — the poles are read as a value judgment rather than a quantity: one pole is negative, the other positive. This grounds evaluative language and a great deal of metaphor (um resultado positivo/negativo).
• Deictic — the center is read as an observer, with one pole accessible to them and the other not. This is what grounds tempo ("time") itself: the future sits at the accessible pole, the present at the center, the past at the opposite pole.

A scale can, in turn, be read specifically as verticality — its poles are up and down — which is the schema behind vertical-spatial metaphor generally: more is up, good is up.

Class#

Concepts grouped by shared features — the schema behind o gato é um mamífero ("the cat is a mammal"), and behind any subtype relation. A class has a member and a criterion: what unifies the class as a whole, independent of any one member. Two classes can share every member and still differ in criterion. Members can be absolutely anything — entities, values, events, even other classes — the only requirement is that a member be a concept at all. You may see this schema referred to informally as SET or CATEGORY; they're the same structure under a different name.

Part-whole#

Composition: a part, related to the dimension that is, itself, the whole it composes. A roda é parte do carro ("the wheel is part of the car") reads directly against this shape — and so does collection membership, João pertence ao clube ("João belongs to the club"), which is composition of a different flavor (an aggregate and its members) rather than classification.

Container#

A dimension partitioned into an interior and an exterior by a boundary, with an optional surface — the exterior region actually touching the boundary. This is the schema behind ordinary spatial containment, a bola está dentro da caixa ("the ball is inside the box"), and behind a great deal of container-flavored metaphor beyond the literal case — being "in" a mood, a category, a relationship.

A container with a portal — a passage through the boundary that permits crossing without breaching it elsewhere — is its own further schema, the shape behind a door, a gate, any opening that lets passage happen at one particular place.

Bearing a value: object, value, and attributes#

Two thin, closely paired schemas sit directly under region, not under dimension, because what separates them isn't a matter of organization — it's a matter of which side of a bearing relationship a region stands on.

Object is a region that bears values, rather than being one — a substance, as against a quality. Value is a region located at a position on a dimension: a reified position, an instance rather than a generic concept. A value on a graduated dimension is a magnitude — a room's temperature, independent of whether it's read off in Celsius or Fahrenheit; a value on a classifying dimension is simply a member, with no magnitude involved at all, azul ("blue") on the dimension COLOR.

Attributes ties the two together: a bearer holds a value on a dimension — entity, value, and attribute as its three roles. This is the schema behind ordinary attribution, whether the value sits on a category (casado, "married"), an unmeasured scale (alto, "tall"), or a measured one (3kg). It's also, quietly, one of the busiest schemas in the whole inventory, because it's what every plain adjective and attributive verb ultimately grounds in — custar ("to cost"), pesar ("to weigh"), any predicate that simply states a borne value with no force involved.

A value can additionally be read as resultant rather than inherent — the position reached by some earlier change, rather than a value simply held. Cansado ("tired") is a resultant value, on the same dimension cansaço ("tiredness") names, with cansar ("to tire") the change that produces it. Nothing about a lexical frame's own analysis has to commit to one reading over the other; the same structure supports both.

The spatial branch: figure and ground#

Figure-ground is where the layer's spatial vocabulary actually starts: a profiled region, picked out relative to a ground, optionally with a figure situated inside it. A região ao norte da cidade ("the region north of the city") profiles just the region and its ground; adding a located entity, a torre ao norte da cidade ("the tower north of the city"), brings the figure into view too.

This is a genuinely different shape from container — figure-ground doesn't partition anything, it just picks a region out relative to another. A frame asserting a bare locative relation, with no inside/outside structure at all, grounds here rather than in container.

Transformation: the event family#

Event is where the layer's dynamic half begins, and it starts minimally — two elements, prior to any split between the side that exerts and the side that's affected:

Both elements are native to EVENT, minted directly over bare REGION — not, as you might expect from the rest of this inventory, over LINK. A LINK is inherently two-place, and EVENT's own minimal case — rain, snow, an Agonist and the force it exerts, nothing else — genuinely only has one participant, so it was never actually a link to begin with.

Four further schemas each independently add a receiving side, Antagonist, on their own terms:

• Agentive — the exerting side's own schema. Agonist is the defining fact; Antagonist is real and bindable, but frequently left unbound. João correu ("João ran") binds only Agonist; João quebrou a janela ("João broke the window") binds both. The exerter may be read as sentient, but only optionally — a tempestade derrubou a árvore ("the storm knocked down the tree") is agentive with no sentience anywhere in it.

• Undergoing — the mirror image: the affected side is the defining fact, Agonist present but backgrounded. A cidade foi devastada ("the city was devastated") — Antagonist is the city, Event is the devastation, the exerter never named at all.

• Experiential — Antagonist is not just added but constitutively sentient: there is no fearing without something capable of fear. Reversing the naive expectation, the sentient participant — the experiencer, the cognizer — binds to Antagonist; whatever they experience binds to Agonist. O barulho me assustou ("the noise scared me") and eu temo o barulho ("I fear the noise") share one analysis under this schema, with the experiencer as the force-receiver in both.

• Change — the family's own home for directed change of every kind, and by far the richest of the four. Beyond Antagonist, it adds three positions:

  Element	What it names
  Ground	the dimension being traversed
  Income	the position occupied before
  Outcome	the position occupied after
  Target	the position the transformation is aimed at, whether or not it's actually reached

  Target is the element that lets a construal record aimed at, but not necessarily reached without any modal machinery: success is the outcome matching the target, and falling short — a parede bloqueou a bola ("the wall blocked the ball") — is simply the outcome differing from it. Direction here belongs to the trajectory the force supplies, not to anyone's intentions; a rolling ball has a projected endpoint and no mind of its own.

A word of caution about Antagonist, wherever it appears, since its gloss misleads more than any other element in the inventory: it is not "the patient," not "whoever Agonist isn't," and not "the affected condition." It is simply the locus — whatever the transformation happens to or in. Aconteceu um acidente ("an accident happened") has no agent and no patient anywhere in it, and the accident itself is the locus all the same — the region moving from not-having-occurred to having-occurred. Under the old, richer design this reading used to need Antagonist's help even for a bare happening with no Antagonist of its own; today a bare-occurrence frame simply binds Event directly, and EVENT on its own is already the bare-occurrence reading.

CHANGE in turn has five further children, each narrowing it in a specific way:

• Transition — narrowed to category-crossing specifically: Ground is required to resolve to a genuine class, and the schema adds a new row asserting that Antagonist is reclassified, not just moved to a new value. Virar médico ("to become a doctor") is the paradigm — o gelo virou água ("ice became water") isn't "reaches a value on the water-ness scale," it's "is now classified as water."
• Motion — genuine displacement specifically, CHANGE's other main narrowing, and a sibling of Transition rather than its child. A spatial motion frame — João foi à loja ("João went to the store") — and a metaphorical one, os preços subiram ("prices rose"), ground in the identical schema here, differing only in what Ground resolves to — a shared target that a purely lexical, spatially-specific frame for literal motion alone could never give them.
• Stative — a force genuinely acts, but produces no displacement: Income and Outcome are held equal, against a force that would otherwise change them. This is the home of maintaining predicates, permanecer, manter, sustentar ("to remain," "to maintain," "to sustain"). The diagnostic that actually distinguishes it from a plain attribute is what happens if it stops — not whether the cast happens to name a maintainer, since maintenance is very often asserted with no maintainer anywhere in view.
• Process — an extended occurrence, made of many sub-events read as a whole rather than one single transition. A água ferveu lentamente ("the water boiled slowly") has a part-way point; a plain, unqualified change doesn't. No new element is needed — the graduation lives entirely in Ground being required to be an ordered dimension.
• Blockage — a moving or changing region meets an obstacle, and the transformation is stopped short of where it was aimed. A parede bloqueou a bola ("the wall blocked the ball"). Nothing modal is involved: the ball has a projected endpoint and no intentions, and its failure to arrive is simply the outcome differing from the target — which is also promoted to a required element here, unlike everywhere else in the family, since a blockage with no directed position isn't really a blockage.

Naming a region without profiling a traversal: source, path, goal#

Three further, deliberately thin schemas sit apart from the rest of this family, each structurally identical to a schema it's parented on — one derived element, nothing more. What earns them their own name isn't new structure; it's that each names a recognizable, reusable role independent of any one frame's own traversal. Source and goal are each simply a VALUE — the reified starting point and aimed-at point MOTION's own Income and Target already coerce to — given their own name so a frame whose LUs denote the origin or destination itself, as a thing (a estrada serpenteava pela floresta, "the road wound through the forest," names the route itself), can ground somewhere purpose-built rather than falling back to a generic entity or locative reading. Path is the same move over AXIS rather than VALUE — a route is inherently ordered, a beginning, an end, and traversable positions between, exactly AXIS's own shape.

None of the three add anything a MOTION-grounded traversal frame doesn't already have access to; they exist for the different, complementary case of a frame that names one of those regions as a free-standing thing, independent of any particular traversal.

Reading this inventory as a modeler#

None of these schemas is ever the whole of what a lexical frame means. A frame is grounded in whichever schema fits its own structure, and the frame's own frame elements are bound to that schema's elements — how that binding actually works, and how a frame is meant to choose among these schemas in the first place, is the subject of the next document, Grounding a Frame. What an individual lexical unit does with the schema its frame is grounded in — which elements it foregrounds, and what that says about the concept it denotes — is the subject of Lexical Units after that.