The Ontological Dimension

Motivation

The ontological dimension classifies a frame and the lexical units it hosts by what they are and how they are construed. It is one of the three dimensions of FrameNet Brasil (alongside the conceptual-spaces dimension and the domain dimension), and like the others it does not replace FrameNet's lexicographic goal — the corpus-grounded annotation of lexical units remains exactly what it was. What the dimension adds is a ground for frame understanding and frame creation: a reference structure a modeller consults when placing a new frame in the resource, or when auditing an existing one, so that the analysis a frame encodes is made explicit and its consistency with the rest of the inventory becomes visible.

The concrete device the dimension is built on is the namespace. An earlier line of work aimed at a frame lattice that would allow the definition of top frames. The difficulty was establishing inheritance or perspective relationships among very generic frames — the top of the lattice resists the ordinary frame-to-frame relations. From Webtool 4.0 onward the idea implemented instead was the namespace: a set of frames that share some basic semantics. Frames in the same namespace need not carry any frame-to-frame relation to one another; the namespace records a shared view, not a shared position in a relational tree.

The whole apparatus is descriptive, not prescriptive. As in FrameNet generally — and as in the DUL ontology this model borrows from — the goal is to encode the modeller's analysis and make inconsistencies visible, never to forbid a construal. Language is a complex system; full coverage is not the target. Useful, honest progress is.

The organizing principle: Event, Situation, and Description (DUL)

The single idea that holds the model together is borrowed from DUL's Descriptions & Situations (D&S) pattern (see the DUL design-patterns document). D&S separates the intensional side of meaning (a theory under which things are viewed) from its extensional side (an actual, contextualized view of some entities):

A Description defines the concepts, roles and relations of a theory. It is intensional — it says how something may be viewed.
A Situation satisfies a Description and is a setting for actual entities and events. It is extensional — one concrete view, consistent with the Description, over a particular set of things.
An Event is something that occurs, with one stable identity. In rock erosion in the Sinni valley, erosion is one event. DUL deliberately does not classify events by aspect; the aspectual view is carried by a Situation. ErosionAsAccomplishment and ErosionAsTransition are two Situations over the same Event, neither of which changes the Event's identity.

This maps directly onto FNBr's annotation architecture:

DUL notion	FNBr correlate
Description — a theory that defines roles and licenses a view	the frame (and the frame elements it defines)
Situation — a concrete view that satisfies a Description and is a setting for actual entities	the annotation set — one annotated occurrence, relating a lexical unit to a whole scene
Event — what occurs, with one stable identity	the lexical unit (LU) the annotation set is built around

The chain that gives the namespace its role runs through these correlates:

An annotation set (Situation) relates an LU (Event) to a whole annotated scene — the target and its frame elements in a corpus sentence.
The LU evokes a frame (Description), and the annotation set therefore satisfies that frame.
The frame belongs to exactly one namespace.

So the namespace, riding on the frame, characterizes the perspective under which the whole situation is viewed — @phenomenon, @change, @agentive, and the rest. And because a Description can be satisfied by many Situations, the same frame applies to many annotation sets: one view-defining theory, many concrete occurrences read under it.

Two consequences follow:

The LU tracks Event identity; the namespace tracks the view. This is why destruição evoking a change-frame is still typed destruição.event and never destruição.change: change is the view a particular frame takes; event is the concept's identity. One LU (Event) therefore maps, through the frames it can evoke, to many compatible namespaces (see Ontological Types for LU).
A single event can legitimately be viewed under more than one namespace. O gelo derreteu may be read as @change (the resulting liquid state is profiled) or @phenomenon (the melting process is profiled). These are two Situations over one Event. The model must therefore expect such pairs and never treat them as errors. This is FrameNet's native notion of perspective applied at the level of the LU and its frame.

Stance

The realist position (events are not changed by how we describe them) and the constructivist position (no event can be modelled without the theoretical burden of how it is observed) are both, taken to extremes, only partly relevant to a working linguistic resource. Following DUL, the model admits Events, Situations, and Descriptions together, so the modeller's analysis is encoded regardless of metaphysical commitment. This is what makes the model descriptive, not prescriptive: it records the chosen view rather than adjudicating the correct one.

Classification

The classification apparatus is what lets FNBr describe and evaluate the namespace assignment of its frames. It serves two practical aims:

To audit existing Lexical Units (LUs) and frames, surfacing assignments that are inconsistent with the namespace they sit in.
To prompt deeper analysis when a new frame is created — not by hard constraint, but by giving the frame creator a reference structure to relate their frame to.

The model has two layers, deliberately operating at different granularities:

Layer	Attaches to	Granularity	Job
Ontological type (see Ontological Types for LU)	LU (Event identity)	Coarse — 5 classes	Catch cross-class errors (an attribute LU in an eventive frame)
Namespace	Frame (the view it takes)	Fine — per-namespace participant signatures	Prompt and evaluate within-class perspectivization

The two layers are complementary and must not be conflated. The coarse layer tracks what a concept is — the identity of the Event. The fine layer is a descriptive reference structure that tracks which view a frame takes — applied by human judgement at frame-creation or audit time. It records the characteristic participant signature of each namespace in a shared qualia-role vocabulary; it is description, not mechanism.

Namespaces

Namespace classification

The namespaces group into four upper classes, according to what a frame in them profiles:

Upper class	Profiles	Namespaces
Eventive	an occurrence or state over the underlying Event — the various views a frame can take of what happens	@phenomenon · @change · @stative · @agentive · @process · @experiential · @undergoing
Ontological	the participants rather than the occurrence — entities, their attributes, and the relations among them	@entity · @attribute · @relational
Structural	organizing scaffolding rather than token predications — schematic conceptual structure	@conceptual
Pragmatic	discourse- and interaction-level meaning rather than propositional content	@pragmatic

The namespaces

Eventive

Namespace	Description
@phenomenon	Phenomenon frames profile a bare occurrence with no caused change, taken as a single unit / punctual happening: no agent, no cause acting on a patient, and no experiencer. Natural phenomena (rain, snow), spontaneous occurrences, existence.
@change	Frames profiling an entity that comes to be in a new condition — either the onset of a resultant state (`BECOME`), pure result, or a directed change along a named dimension (`SHIFT`, Initial→Final), spatial or abstract; the Motion (change of location) frames are its spatial subtype. Organized à la Berkeley by what changes — situation, quality, or category. Includes process phasal boundaries (onset/offset). Sits in the Agentive → Change → Stative chain; its Agentive-paired subset is the causative/change alternation. (Formerly named Inchoative; now also absorbs the former @transition.)
@stative	Frames that represent stative situations (conditions, properties, results).
@agentive	Frames with an Agent (intentional, volitional) or a Cause (non-intentional) that either performs an activity or brings about a change in another entity.
@process	Frames profiling a process as a whole — an extended occurrence composed of many sub-events (a life, a history, an ongoing procedure), as opposed to Phenomenon's single-unit view.
@experiential	Frames foreground a sentient participant — an experiencer or a cognizer — undergoing a mental, perceptual, somatic, or attitudinal event, viewed from that participant's perspective (contraposed to @change).
@undergoing	Frames foreground an affected Patient to which something happens — subjected to, exposed to, or affected by an externally-instigated event, viewed from the undergoer's perspective. The patient-focused counterpart of @agentive (semantic, not voice-based).

Ontological

Namespace	Description
@entity	Frames that represent entities.
@attribute	Frames that represent attributes or attribute values.
@relational	Frames that represent relations between entities or events.

Structural

Namespace	Description
@conceptual	Highly schematic conceptual-space frames — the FrameNet-native realization of the image-schema tradition: spatial and topological primitives (Trajector × Ground × Region, containment, path, force) that other frames Use as the abstract structure their meaning is read against. Belongs to the conceptual-spaces dimension. (Formerly named @image_schema.)

Scenario is no longer a namespace. It was previously listed here, alongside @conceptual, as the second Structural namespace. It is now a frame type — see Frame Classification — and there is no Scenario namespace.

The reason is that a scenario is a scaffold, not a view. A Scenario frame holds together a complex scene that either supports two or more Perspective_on construals of the same participants, or decomposes into ordered Subframes carrying those participants across phases. Which view that scaffolding frame itself takes over the Event is a separate question, and it is answered by its namespace in the ordinary way. Obligation_scenario is @stative; Crime_scenario is @phenomenon; Commerce_scenario is @agentive. The 75 frames carrying the type are distributed across eight namespaces, which is exactly what one expects of a property orthogonal to the ontological dimension.

This makes Scenario the second classification that is orthogonal to namespace, the first being Domain. A frame may be a scenario, sit in a namespace, and belong to a domain, all independently.

Pragmatic

Namespace	Description
@pragmatic	Pragmatic frames.

Perspective notions

Perspective is not a single device in FNBr; it recurs at three levels of granularity, each taking a view over the objects one level below it. The same mechanism — choosing a construal without changing what is construed — operates on frames, on sets of frames, and on the lexical units that evoke a frame.

Level	Device	Perspective over	Native to
Coarsest	Namespace	a frame — which view the frame imposes over the Event	FNBr
Middle	Perspective_on frame relation	a set of frames — sibling construals of one neutral scene	FrameNet
Finest	Frame	the LUs that evoke it — how each lemma is construed	FrameNet

A namespace is a perspective over a frame. As set out above, the namespace records which view a frame takes over the underlying Event — @phenomenon, @change, @stative, @agentive, and so on. This is the coarsest perspective device: it classifies the frame as a whole.
The Perspective_on relation is a perspective over a set of frames. Original to FrameNet, this frame-to-frame relation groups sibling frames that offer alternative construals of one neutral, perspective-free scene (the classic Commercial_transaction profiled as Commercial_buy vs. Commercial_sell). The perspective is not a property of a single frame but of the contrast between the frames in the set.
A frame is a perspective over its LUs. At the finest grain, the frame itself imposes a construal on every lexical unit that evokes it. The lemma inherits the frame's view rather than carrying that view intrinsically.

This third level is why the same verbal lemma can be interpreted as an eventive, a stative, or an agentive verb: the lemma does not fix its own construal. Evoking an @phenomenon frame, it reads as an eventive verb; evoking an @stative frame, as a stative verb; evoking an @agentive frame, as an agentive verb. The lemma is one lexical form; the frame it evokes is what supplies the perspective — the LU-level echo of the Event/Situation distinction that organizes the whole model.