The first major work outlining the framework is James Pustejovsky's 1991 article "The Generative Lexicon".
Unlike purely verb-based approaches to compositionality, generative lexicon attempts to spread the semantic load across all constituents of the utterance.
GL was initially developed as a theoretical framework for encoding selectional knowledge in natural language.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of GL has been the manner in which lexically encoded knowledge is exploited in the construction of interpretations for linguistic utterances.
The computational resources available to a lexical item within this theory consist of the following four levels: The qualia structure, inspired by Moravcsik's (1975) interpretation of the aitia of Aristotle, are defined by Pustejovsky as the modes of explanation associated with a word or phrase in the language, and are defined as follows: