Ternary Qualia+ Relations (TQR)

What is TQR?

TQR (Ternary Qualia+ Relations) is FN-Br's inventory of relations for characterising lexical meaning. It extends Pustejovsky's qualia structure with relations the four qualia don't cover, and grounds the whole set in the DUL foundational ontology.

The motivation is that representing context from linguistic material means associating what is expressed with commonsense knowledge — typically held in an ontology. Each LU carries a parcel of meaning that distinguishes it from other LUs evoking the same frame, and FN-Br is building a lexical ontology to make that reasoning explicit. A lexical ontology explores what lexica and ontologies share while reducing the gaps between them. To implement it, FN-Br reframed two ideas from SIMPLE: coding words as Lexical Units, and using "extended qualia relations" — now represented by Microframes. The full set of these relations is TQR.

Why Qualia+ ?

Pustejovsky (1991, 1995) decomposes word meaning into four qualia — aspects that together characterise an entity:

But the qualia answer questions about a single object's intrinsic profile — a noun-centric model. Even the SIMPLE inventory contains relations the qualia never accounted for:

• Ontological scaffolding — relations expressing ontological structure.
• Relational meaning between distinct entities — kinship, social roles, regulation. The meaning lives in the relation, not in either relatum's qualia.
• Eventive/temporal connective tissue — precedes, follows, has_precondition, co-participates_with: how events sit in sequence and who participates, not what an object is for.

The "+" denotes exactly these non-qualia relations — spatial, eventive, social, and structural — that TQR brings under one inventory alongside the classic qualia.

DUL Integration

To hold the extended set together, TQR integrates with DUL (DOLCE+DnS Ultralite). Microframes live in two namespaces: dul: for the foundational relations, and fnbr: for the lexical specialisations that subsume them. Each fnbr: qualia microframe carries at least one subsumption edge to a DUL microframe, grounding the lexical-semantic relation in a foundational ontology. This enables:

• Inferential generalisation — enables parser rules to fire on DUL relation families and propagate to all fnbr: specialisations via the subsumption hierarchy.
• Cross-domain interoperability — fnbr: microframes are interpretable by any system that understands DUL object properties.
• Unified modelling — frame-level and lexical-level relations share the same microframe abstraction.

The integration is non-breaking (adding subsumption edges does not alter existing frame structure) and descriptive, not prescriptive — the DUL alignment does not impose DUL's stronger ontological commitments on FN-Br annotations.

The two-layer design

Every TQR microframe carries three nested classification axes:

1. a user-facing semantic category (one of the thirteen below, for browsing);
2. a DUL family (which DUL relation it groups under, for querying);
3. a grounding kind — property-grounded (a sub-property of a DUL object property) or description-grounded (a specialization of a DUL class such as dul:Plan). This selects how it integrates with DUL.

Where applicable a microframe also keeps its GL quale (Formal, Constitutive, Telic, Agentive) as provenance.

The category and quale are the human-facing labels; the DUL parent is the machine-facing grounding. A relation may have no quale (much of the scaffolding and eventive material does) while still having a category and a DUL parent.

TQR Structure

The TQR data structure extends the previous version. Its core idea is that the relation between two LUs is grounded not only ontologically but also in the FrameNet network. Since each microframe has a Domain and a Range, a TQR relation links a Frame Element to each. The FEs may belong to the same or different frames, allowing very specific relations without extending the base microframe inventory. This structure is called TQR FE.

A second structure, TQR LU, records the individual relations between LUs; each TQR LU points to a TQR FE.

Semantic Categories

Microframes used by TQR FE are organised into 13 semantic categories — the user-facing axis (see DUL Grounding for how this relates to the DUL family and grounding-kind axes). The set expands the original eleven: the former Agentive & Causation is split into Agentive (agent-driven creation) and Causal (agentless causation), and Semiotic is added for reference relations.

The category names used throughout this documentation are a shorthand. The Stored label column gives the exact string the WebTool's category picker shows (typ_microframe_category, idType 42). Note the labels lag the conceptual split: the Causal category was added as its own row, but the original category's stored label is still Agentive & Causation — it was never shortened to Agentive.