Namespaces

Introduction

An important idea that had been worked on was the possibility of establishing a frame lattice that would allow the definition of top frames. The problem with defining top frames is the difficulty of establishing inheritance or perspective relationships in many generic frames. Thus, the idea implemented from Webtool 4.0 was the definition of namespaces for frames. A namespace is basically a set of frames that share some basic semantics.

The frames sharing the same namespace do not need to have necessarily frame-to-frame relations to each other.

In the current version, the following namespaces are implemented:

Namespace	Description
@domain	Broad fields of knowledge (`Domain:*`) that group other frames thematically — Law, Health, Economy, Motion, Time. Organizational / inheritance roots, not token predications.
@scenario	Recurring complex situation types: multi-participant, phase-structured scaffolds (`*_scenario`) within which eventive frames are embedded.
@image_schema	Spatial primitives / topological schemas (Trajector × Ground × Region) that ground locative, relational, and motion frames.
@eventive	Eventive 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.
@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 Eventive's single-unit view.
@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.
@change	Frames profiling an entity that comes to be in a new resultant state (`BECOME`), the change event profiled rather than any trajectory or cause. 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.)
@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).
@stative	Frames that represent stative situations (conditions, properties, results) .
@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).
@transition	Frames profiling traversal along a dimension — spatial (Source-Path-Goal) or abstract (Initial→Final on quality/category/state/number/size). A named dimension with at least one endpoint lexicalized; distinguished from @change by profiling the trajectory/endpoints. Spatial motion is the Motion subtype.
@attribute	Frames that represent attributes or attribute values.
@entity	Frames that represent entities.
@relational	Frames that represent relations between entities or events.
@pragmatic	Pragmatic frames.

Classification

The documents in this section specify the semantic infrastructure that lets FNBr describe and evaluate the namespace classification of its frames. Namespaces have 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 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 model has two layers, deliberately operating at different granularities:

Layer	Attaches to	Granularity	Job
Ontological type (see Ontological Types for LU)	LU (concept identity)	Coarse — 5 classes	Catch cross-class errors (an attribute LU in an eventive frame)
Namespace description	Frame (the namespace it is classified under)	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 fine layer is a descriptive reference structure that tracks which view a frame takes — and is 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.

The organizing principle: Event vs. Situation (DUL)

The single idea that holds the whole model together is the DUL distinction between an Event and a Situation.

An Event is something that occurs, with one stable identity. In rock erosion in the Sinni valley, erosion is one event.
A Situation is a view of that event, consistent with a Description (a theory under which the view is taken). ErosionAsAccomplishment and ErosionAsTransition are two Situations over the same Event; neither changes the Event's identity.

This maps directly onto FNBr's architecture:

DUL notion	FNBr correlate
Event (stable identity)	the LU / concept and its ontological type
Description (theory licensing a view)	the frame
Situation (the view taken)	the namespace the frame belongs to

Two consequences follow:

The ontological type tracks Event identity; the namespace tracks the Situation/view. This is why destruição evoking a transition-frame is still destruição.event and never destruição.transition: transition is the view a particular frame takes; event is the concept's identity. One ontological type therefore maps 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 @eventive (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 (§4 of Eventive Namespaces). This is the FrameNet's native notion of perspective applied to the LU level.

This is also the realist/constructivist truce DUL is built for: the Event is not changed by how we describe it, while each description still earns its own identity. The model commits to neither metaphysics; it just records both the concept and the view.

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.

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 Situation/view the frame takes	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 — @eventive, @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 @eventive 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.