Compositionality, the principle that complex meanings arise from the meanings of their parts and their mode of combination, has long been the foundation of symbolic logic and formal semantics. Yet, as linguistic theory and NLP have matured, it has become clear that compositionality cannot be reduced to a single functional operation. Meaning construction in context depends on argument typing, event structure, object persistence, and discourse-level constraints, all of which interact in a distributed fashion.
QES extends GL’s event representation by embedding the four qualia roles—Constitutive, Formal, Telic, and Agentive—within the causal and aspectual decomposition of events. Each event is organized around initiation, process, and result phases, and each phase carries its own qualia profile that defines what changes, how, and why.
The DOM complements QES by extending object representation from static types to dynamic participants that record histories of change. Each object instance is a record of attributes whose values evolve as it enters successive events.