Scenarios frames

What a scenario is

A scenario is a high-level grouping of frames that share a common situation or context. It sits one level of abstraction above the frame: where a frame is a particular construal of a situation — a specific "camera angle" with its own lexical units and frame elements — a scenario is the broader possibility space that several such construals belong to. Buying, selling, paying, and pricing are distinct frames; the commercial-transaction scenario is the shared situation they all view from different angles.

Scenarios extend the notion already used in FrameNet to relate frames by situation, but apply it at a deliberately coarse grain. Their purpose is twofold: to organize the frame inventory into intelligible situational families, and to make explicit which areas of human experience are well covered by the resource and which are not. Because a scenario answers the question "what situation is this fundamentally about?", every frame should ultimately belong to one, and the frames that resist classification are themselves a useful signal — either of a missing scenario or of a frame that is structural rather than contentful.

How scenarios relate to domains and subdomains

Scenarios are classified into a fixed, human-managed taxonomy of seven domains (Physical, Biological, Social, Cultural, Psychological, Representational, Moral), each divided into a small set of subdomains. Domains and subdomains carve up what the world contains and how it is described; scenarios populate those slots with concrete situations. The subdomain layer is best understood as a coverage scaffold: each subdomain is a slot meant to be filled with scenarios, and its definition describes the kind of situation that belongs there rather than a closed list.

A scenario belongs to exactly one subdomain — its primary home — chosen by the central activity or relation the scenario construes, not by the entities that happen to participate in it. This is the single most important classification rule, and it recurs throughout the criteria below. Participants, instruments, and side-effects that reach into other domains are handled by cross-references and by hierarchy, not by multiplying a scenario's home.

Criteria for creating and classifying scenarios

Classify by the core construal, not by the participants. The decisive question is what the scenario is fundamentally about, not what entities appear in it. A hunting scenario involves a living animal (Biological), a weapon (an artifact), an intention (Psychological), and food obtained for consumption — but its core is the purposive activity of acquiring a resource, so it is filed under Economy, with the rest recorded as secondary links. Likewise, the act of warfare is a social conflict relation even though the armed forces that wage it are a cultural institution; the two are filed separately.

Distinguish the act or relation from the institution, the object, and the attitude. Several recurring splits follow from the rule above. The practice of science is cultural while the notation that encodes scientific ideas is representational. A weapon is a physical artifact while attacking with it is a social conflict. Prejudice as discrimination is a social relation while holding a biased belief is a psychological state. Drawing these lines consistently keeps each subdomain coherent and prevents any one from absorbing the whole of social or mental life.

Define scenarios at the level the language commits to. Scenario definitions should describe the situation, its participants, and the frame elements it licenses, and should avoid embedding contested empirical or theoretical positions. This is especially important for socially sensitive areas, where the resource should remain descriptively neutral and annotatable rather than encoding a particular sociological or moral theory.

Treat abstract structural frames as relation types, not as content. Some frames do not describe a situation in the world but the scaffolding that other frames inherit — the begin/middle/end profile of a process, causation and transitivity, reciprocity between participants, concessive or scoping relations over events. For the purposes of this classification these are placed in the Representational domain under the Abstract_schemas subdomain, as schemas or relation types. This keeps them inside the system without misrepresenting them as contentful scenarios in a substantive domain, and it keeps them distinct from Knowledge Representation, which concerns the organization of knowledge content rather than the abstract structure of events and relations.

Scenario assignment: direct or inherited

Every frame must resolve to exactly one scenario, but not every frame needs its own. A scenario is assigned to a frame directly only when the frame introduces a situation that is not already captured by an ancestor frame's scenario; otherwise the frame inherits its scenario through the frame-to-frame relation network. A maximally specific frame does not earn a bespoke scenario when it adds only manner or detail to a situation its parent already covers. This requirement gives full coverage — no frame is left orphaned — without forcing one scenario per frame, which would multiply scenarios far beyond the number of distinct situations in the resource. The useful test is whether the frame introduces participants or roles its parent's scenario lacks: if it does, it earns a scenario; if it only specializes, it inherits one.

Two qualifications keep this rule honest. First, structural frames are not exempt: an abstract frame such as Evento or Ação_transitiva resolves to a schema-scenario in Abstract_schemas, so that "every frame resolves to a scenario" remains literally true and no frame acquires a quiet "no scenario" status. Second, a contentful frame may not resolve to a schema-scenario by inheritance. A frame that is genuinely about something — attacking, cooking, curing — belongs to a content scenario even when its inheritance chain passes only through structural ancestors; in that case the content scenario must be assigned directly. Without this qualification, inheritance would quietly route contentful frames into the abstract schemas and recreate the very dumping ground this design removes.

This is also why the former catch-all scenario Situação_dinâmica is dissolved rather than inherited from. It conflated two different relations — structural inheritance between frames and situational membership in a scenario — and used a single bucket for both. Its abstract members (the event, action, and causation schemas) move to Abstract_schemas; its contentful members receive real content scenarios or inherit them from a contentful ancestor. The label may persist as a frame at the root of the dynamic-situation inheritance hierarchy, but it is no longer used as a scenario.

Hierarchical scenarios

Scenarios may be related to one another, so that a scenario can be a subframe of a more abstract scenario, or an abstract scenario can gather several concrete ones as subframes. This makes it possible to reuse a scenario across more than one situation and to build general scenarios whose specific cases are spelled out as children. Racism, homophobia, and ageism, for example, are the same relational structure specialized to different social categories, and are naturally modeled as subframes of a single abstract Prejudice scenario.

Hierarchy is also the right tool for cross-cutting topics that do not belong to any single subdomain. Food and transportation each span several domains: eating is a physiological function, food as substance is matter, cooking is a physical transformation, and food service is an economic transaction. Rather than forcing such a topic into one slot, it is modeled as an abstract "super-scenario" whose subframes are distributed across the domains where each construal naturally lives, with the super-scenario filed under its centre of gravity. The same approach applies to transportation, centred on motion but reaching into artifacts and economy. In this way the hierarchy carries the multi-domain reality of a topic without sacrificing the rule that each individual scenario has a single, principled home.