At any point in this ascent, we can coarsen the granularity and view the complex entity that has been constructed as an indecomposable entity, itself ready to become the basis for another ascent.
this ascent is reflected in the common pattern or decomposition for verbs, which we can represent, not quite formally, as cause (a, change(at(b, c) a causes there to be a change of state from b being at c to b being at d. this schema, or something similar to it, has been central in much work on lexical semantics, including Gruber (1965), Jackendoff (1976), Hobbs (1974), talmy (1983), and Croft (1991).