Languages as Ontologies: 3 Mapping the Construal of Experience

Introduction

If the ideational metafunction is a theory of experience, then languages are more than tools for communication: they are ontologies of construal. Each language offers a lattice of distinctions—processes, participants, circumstances, relations, and modality—through which potential phenomena are actualised. This post explores this idea, showing how languages differ in structuring experience, and how these differences illuminate the relational nature of meaning and reality.

---

Language and the Actualisation of Experience

Languages do not “mirror” a pre-existing reality. From a relational-ontology perspective:

• Reality only exists as construed; phenomena have no meaning outside their actualisation.

• Languages are semiotic lattices that selectively foreground certain distinctions and background others.

• Variation across languages shows the diverse ways experience can be patterned, without implying multiple independent worlds.

Thus, different linguistic ontologies are ontologies of construal, not separate ontologies of reality.

---

Axes of Linguistic Ontology

We can frame language-specific ontologies along five interrelated axes:

1. Process Type – How processes are categorised and foregrounded (material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, existential, aspectual patterns).

2. Participant – How participants are individuated and related to processes (agentive vs. non-agentive, animate vs. inanimate, relationally encoded).

3. Circumstance – Which circumstances are foregrounded and how they are encoded (time, place, manner, cause, accompaniment).

4. Relations – How entities and processes are connected (possession, part-whole, spatial, temporal, topological).

5. Modality/Epistemic Status – How possibility, necessity, certainty, and evidence are expressed.

---

Comparative Lattice: Four Languages

Below is a textual matrix comparing English, Japanese, Warlpiri, and Hopi across these axes:

---

Key Observations

1. Foregrounding differs: English separates process types and participants distinctly; Hopi foregrounds temporal/aspectual patterns and relational encoding.

2. Circumstantial encoding shapes construal: Warlpiri’s absolute spatial reference or Hopi’s morphologically encoded situational context produces radically different ways of experiencing space and time.

3. Modality and perspective vary: Japanese and Hopi grammaticalise evidentiality and speaker perspective, whereas English relies on lexical modals and Warlpiri on contextual inference.

4. Relational ontology is central: In Warlpiri and Hopi, relations are encoded within verbs, demonstrating that construal is relational rather than object-focused.

---

Implications for Relational Ontology

The comparative lattice illustrates a core insight of relational ontology:

• Meaning = Reality: Reality only exists as it is actualised in a semiotic construal.

• Languages are semiotic lattices of potential: They provide patterned possibilities for how experience can be structured.

• Diversity of linguistic ontologies reveals the multiplicity of construals: The same potential field of phenomena can be patterned differently, foregrounding some distinctions and backgrounding others.

In short, languages instantiate ontological perspectives rather than mirror independent worlds.

---

Conclusion

Seeing languages as ontologies reframes linguistic diversity: it is not merely a matter of vocabulary or grammar, but of how experience itself can be structured and made manifest. The matrix above offers a glimpse into the semiotic lattices that shape our perception of the world, showing how relational ontology and the ideational metafunction together illuminate the multiplicity of construals human languages afford.

Future explorations could expand this comparative framework, adding more languages, or mapping lattices in more detail, to reveal even richer variations in the actualisation of experience.