It is by now widely accepted that a number of tasks in natural language understanding (NLU) require the storage of and reasoning with a vast amount of background (commonsense) knowledge. While several efforts have been made to build such ontologies, a consensus on a scientific methodology for ontological design is yet to emerge. In this paper we suggest an approach to building a commonsense ontology for language understanding using language itself as a design guide. The idea is rooted in Frege's conception of compositional semantics and is related to the idea of type inferences in strongly-typed, polymorphic programming languages. The method proposed seems to (i) resolve the problem of multiple inheritance; (ii) suggest an explanation for polysemy and metaphor; and (iii) provide a step towards establishing a systematic approach to ontological design.
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