Troponomy

Verb hierarchies: doing vs happening, modal verbs

Troponomy organises verbs in hierarchies analogous to class and property trees. Two large branches cover active agency (°doing) versus events that simply happen (°happening). Finer distinctions mirror hyponymy in lexical semantics; verbs combine with modal verbs (must, may, can) in constrained patterns.

This layer is often absent from pure “thing-centric” ontologies yet matters when actions, obligations, or process labels must align with natural language. [GoWi2015a] supplies linguistic background.

Troponomy-informed labels for rules and predicates keep user-facing text aligned with the same verb families as the conceptual model.