A method for processing a natural language query. The method includes receiving a text query, the query referring to a plurality of objects, attributes, qualifiers and other arguments and parsing the query to produce an argument tree representing the substance and structure of the query. The method also includes the capability to define qualifiers as being possibly projectable onto other arguments and indicate their direction of projectability and the capability to denote nodes of the argument tree as foldable, as splittable, or as containing sequences of qualifier arguments. The method additionally includes defining validity rules for a domain of knowledge, used to determine whether a list of arguments form a valid granular query component and processing of the argument tree, in view of the above in order to derive a corresponding plurality of granular query components that collectively request the plurality of pieces of information representing the intent of the query.