Domain Frames

Domains are high-level conceptual areas of knowledge. Domains are organized according to the major human experience, knowledge, and conceptualization. This implementation considers 7 fundamental domains that reflects a distinct dimension of reality, as perceived, conceptualized, and organized by human cognition and culture.

Subdomains are thematic divisions within a domain that organize more specific areas of knowledge or activity. They refine the conceptual scope of a domain. Subdomains introduce more focused conceptual distinctions, organizing the structure for the definition of scenarios.

Domains (and subdomains) are implemented as the top-level frames in frame hierarchy.

Physical Domain

The Physical domain covers the material world and the framework within which it exists: the substances things are made of, how they move and where they are located, how they change form, the natural processes that act on them, the objects and made artifacts that populate the world, and the spatial and temporal dimensions along which everything is situated. It is the most basic layer of description, the one against which biological, psychological, and social phenomena are ultimately grounded.

Frames in this domain typically describe events and states that could be observed by a physicist or an engineer rather than by a psychologist or a sociologist: a rock falling, water freezing, an object being pushed. The participants are usually entities and forces rather than intentional agents, which distinguishes this domain from the Social and Psychological ones even when the same verbs (move, break, hold) appear in all of them.

Matter

Concerns substances and materials themselves — what things are composed of, their physical states (solid, liquid, gas), and their basic properties such as mass, density, and texture. This subdomain answers the question "what is this made of and what is it like as stuff," before any consideration of shape, purpose, or use.

It groups frames about substances and their qualities rather than about discrete objects (which belong under Object). Typical content includes materials, mixtures, and the intrinsic properties that let us compare and classify portions of matter.

Motion

Covers movement through space considered as change of position over time: paths, trajectories, sources, goals, directions, speed, and manner of moving. It includes both self-propelled motion and motion caused by an external force, as long as the focus is on the spatial change itself rather than on intention or social meaning.

This is one of the richest areas in any FrameNet, because motion verbs are abundant and finely differentiated. It is the single home for movement frames, drawing together both the physical mechanics of moving and the abstract spatial-temporal structure of a trajectory.

Location

Concerns where things are: position, containment, contact, distance, direction, shape, and the static spatial relationships between entities. Unlike Motion, it describes configurations that hold rather than changes that happen, and it carries the abstract structure of space — being to the left of, being far from, forming a region — alongside concrete placement.

It supplies the background against which motion is understood: a starting point, a goal, a region. Frames here describe being somewhere, putting something somewhere, and the spatial relations that orient objects to one another.

Physical_transformation

Covers change in the form, state, or integrity of physical things: melting, breaking, building, dissolving, growing in the purely physical sense, as well as beginning, ending, increasing, and decreasing considered as variation over time. The entity stays in the material world but its properties, structure, or quantity change.

This subdomain captures causation and change in the physical realm — something acts on something else and alters it, or some quantity varies across time — without yet involving the goals of a social agent. It is the natural home for create/destroy and change-of-state frames.

Natural_phenomena

Concerns processes that occur in the natural environment without a human or animal agent directing them: weather, geological events, light and sound as physical occurrences, fire, tides, and similar happenings. The driving force is nature itself rather than an intentional being.

Frames here describe events that simply happen to the world — it rains, the ground shakes, the sun rises. The absence of an agent is the defining feature, separating these from otherwise similar caused events in the Physical_transformation subdomain.

Object

Covers discrete physical entities considered as bounded individual things rather than as undifferentiated matter: their shape, parts, boundaries, and existence as countable items. This is where a "thing" is treated as a unit.

It complements Matter (which is about stuff) by handling objecthood — having edges, parts, and an identity as one item. The subdomain covers natural and unmodified objects; deliberately made functional things belong under Artifacts.

Artifacts

Covers things deliberately made by people to serve a function: tools, machines, instruments, devices, vehicles, and built structures. The defining feature is that the object exists by design and for a purpose, which distinguishes artifacts from the natural objects of the Object subdomain.

Frames here describe functional objects and the made environment — what they are, what parts they have, and what they are for. This is a heavily lexicalized area of FrameNet (artifacts, buildings, vehicles, devices) that would otherwise fall between the cracks of natural objects and the social practices built around them.

Time

Covers the structure of time: moments, durations, intervals, sequences, frequency, and the ordering of events as before, after, or simultaneous. It provides the temporal coordinates against which change and process are understood, just as Location provides the spatial ones.

Frames here describe temporal relations and intervals — lasting, recurring, preceding, following. Because nearly every event has a temporal aspect, this subdomain is pervasive; it captures time as a dimension of description rather than any particular event that happens within it.

Biological Domain

The Biological domain covers living things and the processes that sustain life: the classification of organisms, how they grow and reproduce, how their bodies are structured and function, what it means to be healthy or ill, and how living things relate to one another and their environment. It sits between the Physical domain (its material substrate) and the Psychological and Social domains (which build on living, sentient beings).

Frames here apply to plants, animals, and humans considered as biological organisms rather than as social or thinking agents. The distinction matters: eating as a physiological function belongs here, while dining as a social occasion belongs in the Social domain even though the same activity is involved.

Biological_entity

Concerns living organisms themselves and how they are categorized: species, kinds of plants and animals, taxonomic groupings, and the basic distinction between living and non-living things. It is the inventory of what counts as alive.

This subdomain provides the entities that the other biological subdomains act upon. It includes naming and classifying organisms and recognizing the features that mark something as a living being.

Life_process

Covers the fundamental processes that characterize living things over time: birth, growth, development, reproduction, aging, and death. These are the events that every organism undergoes as part of being alive.

Frames here describe the life cycle and its stages. They are biological in focus — the physical and developmental reality of coming into being, maturing, and ceasing to live — rather than the social or emotional meanings layered on top of them.

Health

Concerns states of wellness and illness, disease and injury, healing, medicine, and medical care. It covers what can go wrong with an organism and what is done to prevent or repair it.

This is a large and practically important area, spanning conditions (being sick, being injured), causes (infection, harm), and responses (treatment, recovery, care). It connects to the Social domain through healthcare institutions but is grounded in the biological reality of the body.

Body

Covers anatomy and physical structure: body parts, organs, tissues, and the physical makeup of organisms. It describes how living bodies are put together.

Frames here name and locate the components of the body and describe their spatial and structural relationships. This subdomain is the biological counterpart to Object in the Physical domain — bounded parts with identities — but specific to living things.

Physiological_functions

Concerns the ongoing internal workings of the body: breathing, digestion, circulation, sensation at the bodily level, and other automatic processes that keep an organism functioning. These are activities the body performs to stay alive.

Unlike Life_process, which spans the whole life cycle, this subdomain is about the moment-to-moment functioning of a living body. It includes bodily activities such as eating, sleeping, and excreting considered as physiological events rather than social or experiential ones.

Ecology

Covers the relationships between organisms and their environment and with each other: habitats, food chains, populations, ecosystems, and environmental balance. The focus is on living things in their interconnected systems.

Frames here describe how organisms depend on, compete with, and affect one another and their surroundings. This subdomain scales up from individual organisms to the systems they form, bridging biology and the natural environment.

Social Domain

The Social domain covers human beings as members of groups and societies: the roles they occupy, the institutions they build, how they exchange goods, how they govern and regulate themselves, and how they interact day to day. It is grounded in the biological reality of humans but concerns what emerges when people coordinate, organize, and live together.

Frames here involve intentional agents acting in a shared social world where conventions, expectations, and relationships matter. The same physical act can be purely physical (handing over an object) or deeply social (giving a gift, paying a debt); this domain captures the layer of meaning that arises from human coordination.

Social_roles

Concerns the positions and identities people hold in society: occupations, family roles, statuses, and the rights and expectations attached to being a parent, a teacher, a citizen, a stranger. It is about who someone is socially, not personally.

Frames here define people by their place in a social structure and the relationships that place implies. A role brings expectations and standing, which is what makes social roles different from mere descriptions of individuals.

Organizations

Covers structured groups that act with some unity of purpose: companies, agencies, clubs, schools as institutions, and the offices and hierarchies within them. The focus is on collective entities that persist beyond their individual members.

Frames here treat organizations as agents in their own right — they hire, decide, produce, and dissolve. This subdomain captures the institutional layer of social life, distinct from the individuals who staff it at any moment.

Economy

Concerns the production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services: buying and selling, money, wealth, work for pay, markets, and trade, as well as the broader ways people obtain and provision the resources they live on. It is one of the most densely lexicalized areas of human activity.

Frames here describe commercial transactions and economic relationships, including the well-known commerce frames that model buyer, seller, goods, and money. As a coverage scaffold this subdomain is expected to host more specific scenarios — for example exchange and transfer, employment, industry and manufacture, agriculture, and subsistence procurement (obtaining food or raw materials by effort rather than purchase) — which can be organized as concrete scenarios nested under more abstract ones. This is where provisioning activities such as hunting, fishing, gathering, and mining find a home when construed as resource acquisition rather than as ecological relationships.

Government

Covers the exercise of collective authority: governing bodies, political power, public administration, elections, and the making and enforcing of public policy. It concerns how societies organize their collective decision-making and control.

Frames here describe ruling, governing, representing, and administering. This subdomain is closely tied to Law (which provides the rules) and to Organizations (governments being a kind of institution), but its distinctive focus is on authority and the political process.

Law

Concerns rules, regulations, justice, and their enforcement: legality and illegality, crimes and punishments, courts, contracts, rights as legally defined, and legal process. It is about the formal normative system that societies use to bind behavior.

Frames here cover the criminal process, legal judgments, obligations, and permissions. The domain connects strongly to the Moral domain (which concerns right and wrong more broadly) but is specifically about codified, enforceable rules and the institutions that apply them.

Social_interactions

Covers the direct dealings between people: meeting, helping, cooperating, competing, arguing, agreeing, and forming and maintaining relationships, as well as the dynamics of groups acting collectively. It is the texture of interpersonal social life.

Frames here describe what happens between individuals and small groups as they relate to one another, spanning cooperation and conflict, reciprocity, and collective behavior at the interpersonal scale.

Conflict_and_cooperation

Covers the dynamics of how social agents stand in relation to one another along the axis of antagonism and alliance, at any scale: violence, conflict, competition, war, invasion, diplomacy, domination, oppression, and prejudice, as well as the alliances, truces, and cooperative pacts that arise in response to them. Its defining feature is that the relation itself is structured by opposition or by the management of opposition — whether the parties are two individuals or two nations.

Frames here describe attacking and defending, dominating and resisting, negotiating and allying, and the structural relations of group hierarchy and racialization. The subdomain is deliberately scale-independent: an interpersonal assault and an interstate war share the same relational structure of one party acting against another. It is the natural home for high-level scenarios such as racism (a structural relation of group domination) and warfare-as-conflict, while the institutions that wage war — the armed forces — remain in the Cultural domain's Military subdomain, keeping the relation distinct from the institution that conducts it.

Cultural Domain

The Cultural domain covers the shared symbolic and expressive life of human communities: their knowledge systems, religions, arts, organized institutions of learning and defense, and the activities people pursue beyond mere survival. Where the Social domain concerns coordination and structure, the Cultural domain concerns meaning, expression, and the cultivated practices that communities transmit across generations.

Frames here describe practices that are learned, taught, performed, and valued within a culture: worship, artistic creation, scholarship, athletic competition, recreation. These activities rest on social organization but are distinguished by their expressive, intellectual, or recreational purpose.

Science

Concerns systematic inquiry and knowledge production: research, experimentation, theories, scientific disciplines, and the methods of investigation. It is about the organized human effort to understand the world — and what counts as science, and how it is pursued, varies across cultures, which is why it sits here rather than among the formal means of representation.

Frames here describe investigating, discovering, theorizing, and measuring. The subdomain concerns the practice and content of inquiry itself; how scientific ideas are encoded and notated belongs instead to the Representational domain.

Religion

Covers belief systems concerning the sacred, the divine, and ultimate meaning, along with their associated practices: worship, ritual, faith, religious institutions, and doctrines. It addresses how communities relate to what they hold transcendent.

Frames here describe religious belief, observance, and the roles and institutions that sustain them. The subdomain spans both the inner dimension of faith and the outward practices and organizations through which it is expressed.

Art

Concerns creative and aesthetic expression: visual art, music, literature, performance, and the making and appreciating of works valued for their form and meaning. It is about human creativity directed toward expressive ends.

Frames here describe creating, performing, and responding to artistic works, as well as the qualities by which such works are judged. This subdomain captures the aesthetic dimension of culture, distinct from purely practical making.

Military

Covers organized armed force and warfare: armies, weapons in use, combat, strategy, defense, and the institutions of the armed forces. It concerns collective organized violence and the structures built around it.

Frames here describe fighting, attacking, defending, and the military organizations and roles involved. The subdomain connects to Government (state authority) and to the Social domain's interaction frames but is distinguished by its focus on organized, institutional force.

Education

Concerns teaching and learning as organized social activities: schooling, instruction, training, curricula, and educational institutions. It is about the deliberate transmission of knowledge and skills.

Frames here describe teaching, studying, instructing, and the institutional settings in which education occurs. The subdomain bridges the Psychological domain (learning as a cognitive process) and the Social domain (schools as organizations), with its distinctive focus on the intentional, organized passing on of competence.

Sport_and_leisure

Covers recreation, athletic competition, and free-time activity pursued for achievement or enjoyment rather than obligation: games, matches, teams, athletes, hobbies, entertainment, travel for pleasure, and relaxation. It concerns how people spend discretionary time, including rule-governed physical contest.

Frames here describe competing, playing, scoring, and pursuing pastimes. The subdomain brings together organized sport and broader recreation, both of which are oriented toward enjoyment and achievement and set apart from work.

Psychological Domain

The Psychological domain covers the inner mental life of individuals: how they perceive and feel, what drives them, what they attend to and remember, how they reason and decide, what they believe and know, what they intend, and how they evaluate. It concerns the mind of the experiencing, thinking agent — the layer between the biological body and outward social action.

Frames here typically involve an Experiencer or Cognizer rather than a purely physical participant. The subdomains group closely related mental acts into a compact set, so the domain reflects the major divisions of mental life without proliferating fine distinctions.

Perception_and_sensation

Concerns the registering of information through the senses and the felt quality of what is sensed: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, together with the qualities of brightness, loudness, pain, and warmth as experienced. It is about how the mind takes in the world and how that intake feels.

Frames here describe perceiving and the roles of perceiver, stimulus, and sensory channel, as well as bodily and sensory qualities. The subdomain unites the act of perceiving with the raw experience that accompanies it.

Emotion

Concerns feelings and affective states: joy, fear, anger, sadness, love, and their many gradations, as well as the events that arouse them. It is about how people feel emotionally and what causes those states.

Frames here describe experiencing emotion, the stimulus that triggers it, and emotional reactions and expressions. This is a rich and well-studied area in FrameNet, with clear Experiencer and Stimulus roles.

Motivation

Covers what drives behavior from within: needs, desires, urges, and the goals that prompt action. It concerns the internal forces that move an agent to act.

Frames here describe wanting, needing, and being driven toward something. This subdomain links inner states to action, sitting upstream of Intention (the forming of a specific purpose) and of goal-directed behavior.

Subjective_experience

Concerns the felt, first-person quality of mental life: how things seem to the experiencer, states of consciousness, moods, and the overall sense of one's own condition and surroundings. It captures experience as lived from the inside.

Frames here describe how an environment or situation feels to someone, and general states of awareness and feeling that are not tied to a single sense or emotion. It is the most introspective of the psychological subdomains.

Attention

Covers the focusing of mental resources: noticing, concentrating, ignoring, and directing awareness toward or away from things. It concerns the selective spotlight of the mind.

Frames here describe attending to, noticing, and disregarding. This subdomain often works closely with perception (what is attended is often what is perceived) but is specifically about selection and focus rather than sensory intake.

Memory_and_learning

Concerns the storing, retrieving, and acquiring of information and skills over time: remembering, forgetting, recalling, recognizing, coming to know, and mastering. It is about the mind's relationship to its own contents and how those contents and capacities grow.

Frames here describe committing to memory, recalling, failing to recall, learning, and becoming competent. The subdomain connects to Education (the social organization of learning) but here the focus is the cognitive process itself.

Reasoning_and_decision

Concerns thinking processes that work toward conclusions and choices: inferring, deducing, problem-solving, calculating, weighing alternatives, and committing to a course. It treats deliberation and choice as one continuous cognitive process.

Frames here describe reasoning, inferring, solving, and deciding. The subdomain runs from working something out to settling on what to do, capturing the mind manipulating information and arriving at a commitment.

Belief_and_knowledge

Covers what an agent holds to be true and what an agent knows: believing, doubting, assuming, suspecting, trusting, knowing, being aware, and understanding. It is about the mind's stance toward propositions and its possession of established information.

Frames here describe holding beliefs with varying confidence and knowing or being aware of things. The subdomain spans the continuum from tentative assumption to settled knowledge, treating conviction and knowledge as closely related cognitive states.

Intention

Concerns the forming of purposes and plans to act: intending, planning, aiming, and committing to do something. It bridges inner motivation and outward action.

Frames here describe intending and planning. This subdomain sits between Motivation (the drive) and actual behavior (in the Social or Physical domains), capturing the formation of a specific goal-directed purpose.

Evaluation

Covers judging the worth, quality, or correctness of things: appraising, rating, approving, criticizing, and assessing. It concerns the mind's verdicts about value and merit.

Frames here describe evaluating and judging in the cognitive sense. This is non-moral appraisal — a good wine, a strong argument — as distinct from Moral_judgment in the Moral domain, which concerns right and wrong.

Representational

The Representational domain covers signs, symbols, and the systems by which meaning is encoded, conveyed, and stored: language, communication, information, media, formal systems, and structured knowledge. It concerns not the world itself but the means by which the world is represented and shared.

Frames here describe acts of communicating and the structures that carry meaning — saying, writing, signaling, recording, encoding. This domain underlies much of human culture and cognition, since almost all coordinated activity depends on representing and transmitting information.

Sign

Concerns the basic relationship of standing-for: symbols, signals, marks, and indicators that point to or represent something else. It is the foundational layer of representation, prior to any particular language or medium.

Frames here describe signifying, indicating, and symbolizing. This subdomain captures the general semiotic relation — one thing standing for another — that all the other representational subdomains specialize.

Communication

Covers the conveying of messages between agents: speaking, telling, asking, informing, expressing, and responding. It concerns the transmission of meaning from one party to another.

Frames here describe communicative acts and their participants — speaker, addressee, message, medium. This is among the most heavily populated areas of FrameNet, since verbs of saying and communicating are abundant and finely differentiated.

Language

Concerns natural language as a system: words, grammar, meaning, translation, and the properties of linguistic expression itself. It is about language as an object of description, distinct from particular acts of communicating.

Frames here describe linguistic units and operations — naming, meaning, phrasing, translating. The subdomain treats language reflexively, as a structured system, which sets it apart from Communication (the use of language to convey messages).

Information

Covers content considered as such: facts, data, records, and the having, giving, and seeking of information independent of the particular words used. It concerns the informational payload rather than its linguistic form.

Frames here describe informing, recording, and the status of content as known, hidden, true, or available. The subdomain connects to Communication (the transfer of information) and to Belief_and_knowledge in the Psychological domain (the mental possession of it).

Media

Concerns the channels and technologies of representation and distribution: text, print, broadcast, digital systems, and the platforms through which information and expression circulate. It is about the means of carrying and spreading representations.

Frames here describe publishing, broadcasting, recording, and the digital and physical media that store and convey content. The subdomain captures the technological and institutional infrastructure of representation, complementing the more abstract Sign and Information subdomains.

Formal_systems

Covers abstract structured systems of representation: mathematics, logic, notation, codes, and rule-governed symbolic systems. It concerns representations whose meaning is defined by formal rules rather than by reference to the everyday world.

Frames here describe calculating, formalizing, encoding, and operating within rule-governed systems. This subdomain is the home for the precise, abstract end of representation, distinct from natural language and everyday information. It is also where the encoding of scientific ideas lives, as opposed to the practice of science itself in the Cultural domain.

Knowledge_representation

Concerns the deliberate structuring of knowledge content for storage, reasoning, and reuse: classification, taxonomy, part-whole and set relations, similarity and distinction, instance-of, and organized bodies of knowledge. It is about how knowledge is arranged so that it can be navigated and applied — the organization of content.

Frames here describe classifying, comparing, relating, and organizing knowledge into structures (for example Categorização, Relação_conceitual, Relação_parte-todo_e_conjunto, Similaridade_e_distinção, Exemplaridade_e_instância). The subdomain is especially relevant to the FN3 enterprise itself, since FrameNet and its ontological commitments are a form of knowledge representation. It is distinguished from Abstract_schemas (which holds the pre-conceptual relational scaffolding that frames inherit, not the organization of content) and from Formal_systems (rule-governed symbolic systems), and connects to the Psychological domain's Belief_and_knowledge subdomain.

Abstract_schemas

Covers the pre-conceptual relational scaffolding that other frames inherit rather than any content about the world: the structure of events and processes (begin–middle–end profile, causation, transitivity), reciprocity and symmetry between participants, concessive and conditional relations, scope over events, force dynamics, and order versus disorder. Its defining feature is that a scenario here does not describe a situation but the schema by which situations are built and related — the same abstraction level as image schemas and relation types.

Frames here are the structural parents in the inheritance network — Evento, Ação_transitiva, Causação, and their kin — together with relational schemas such as Estrutura_de_processo, Reciprocidade, Circunstância_contrária, Escopo_de_evento, and Estado_de_ordem. This subdomain is the principled home for the abstract frames that were previously parked in the catch-all Situação_dinâmica scenario: it lets every such frame resolve to a meaningful schema-scenario without pretending to be contentful. It is kept distinct from Knowledge_representation (organization of content), Formal_systems (formal symbolic rules), and the Psychological reasoning subdomains (cognitive processes rather than abstract structure). Contentful frames must not resolve here by inheritance — a frame that is about something belongs to a content scenario, even if its inheritance chain passes through these schemas.

Moral Domain

The Moral domain covers right and wrong and the normative life of communities: shared conventions, judgments of good and bad conduct, the rights and duties people owe one another, and the distinctively moral emotions. It concerns the evaluative dimension of human action — not what is done, but whether it ought to be done.

Frames here describe approving and condemning, obligations and entitlements, fairness and transgression, guilt and indignation. The domain overlaps with Law (codified norms) and with the Psychological domain's Evaluation subdomain (appraisal in general), but is distinguished by its focus on moral value specifically.

Conventions

Concerns shared norms, customs, and standards of expected behavior: etiquette, social rules, propriety, and what is considered appropriate or inappropriate. It covers the informal normative expectations that guide conduct short of formal law.

Frames here describe conforming to or violating norms and standards of behavior. This subdomain captures the soft normative layer — manners, customs, the done thing — that underlies both moral judgment and formal law.

Moral_judgment

Covers the evaluation of conduct as morally good or bad, right or wrong, virtuous or blameworthy. It concerns verdicts about the moral quality of actions, agents, and character.

Frames here describe morally approving, condemning, praising, and blaming. The subdomain is the moral counterpart to the Psychological domain's Evaluation — the same act of judging, but specifically along the dimension of moral worth rather than quality or merit in general.

Rights_and_duties

Concerns entitlements and obligations: what people are owed, what they owe, fairness, justice, permission, and prohibition considered morally rather than legally. It covers the structure of moral claims between agents.

Frames here describe having rights, bearing duties, and the fairness or injustice of how people are treated. The subdomain connects to Law (which formalizes many such claims) but addresses the underlying moral relationships of obligation and desert.

Moral_emotions

Covers feelings that arise specifically in response to moral situations: guilt, shame, indignation, gratitude, remorse, and moral admiration. These are emotions whose objects are moral — one's own or others' rightness or wrongness.

Frames here describe feeling and expressing morally laden emotions. The subdomain sits at the intersection of the Moral and Psychological domains, capturing emotions (which belong to mental life) that are distinctively about moral value.