Introduction
Languages do not merely encode stories—they shape how stories are experienced, structured, and told. The semiotic lattices we’ve mapped—processes, participants, circumstances, relations, and modality—manifest directly in narrative practice. In this post, we compare how stories might unfold in English, Japanese, and Warlpiri/Hopi, highlighting how ontological differences produce distinct narrative textures.
1. Event Segmentation and Process Type
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English: Events are often segmented into discrete, agent-driven actions. A story might foreground “who did what to whom” with clear causal chains.
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Example: “The girl picked up the basket. She walked to the river. She dropped the basket into the water.”
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Processes: material (picked, walked, dropped) dominate, relational and mental processes provide background.
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Hopi/Warlpiri: Events may be expressed relationally or aspectually, with focus on process flow rather than discrete agents.
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Example: “The basket moved with her steps, flowing toward the river, the water welcoming its arrival.”
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Processes: blending material and state; temporal/aspectual patterns emphasised; agentive causation backgrounded.
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Japanese: Events are often topically structured, with attention to animate/inanimate distinctions and perspective, often integrating mental and relational processes with stative aspects.
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Example: “The basket, carried along by the girl, approached the river, as everyone watched with anticipation.”
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Processes: material and relational, stative aspect foregrounded, perspective and evidentiality encoded.
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2. Participant Ontology and Focalisation
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English: Participants are discrete; the protagonist is foregrounded, others backgrounded.
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Warlpiri/Hopi: Participants are encoded relationally, often in relation to kinship, place, or temporal cycles. Focus is on how entities interact within their environment.
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Japanese: Animacy and topicality shape prominence; the narrative may shift focus depending on what is culturally or contextually relevant.
Effect: English stories often feel linear and hero-focused; Hopi/Warlpiri narratives feel distributed, interconnected, and cyclical; Japanese stories foreground relational or socially contextual prominence.
3. Circumstance and Spatial Embedding
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English: Place and time are usually adjuncts; optional but often used to situate events.
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Warlpiri: Absolute spatial reference is obligatory; the landscape is an active participant in narrative.
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Hopi: Circumstances are morphologically encoded, tightly linking events to temporal and situational context.
Effect: English narratives are “portable”—anywhere can serve as setting. Warlpiri/Hopi narratives are rooted in a particular place and moment, making geography and environmental relations narratively central.
4. Relations and Interconnectedness
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English: Relations such as possession or part-whole are usually explicit; events often isolated.
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Hopi/Warlpiri: Relations are integrated in verbs; actions and participants are interdependent, emphasizing relational dynamics over individual agency.
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Japanese: Relational verbs and particles allow nuanced connections, often signalling subtle social or hierarchical dynamics.
Effect: English narratives highlight discrete actions and objects, Hopi/Warlpiri emphasize interconnected processes, Japanese foregrounds socially and contextually mediated interactions.
5. Modality and Epistemic Framing
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English: Modal verbs indicate possibility or necessity; certainty is lexically expressed.
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Hopi/Japanese: Evidentiality is grammaticalised; narratives encode source, certainty, and perspective directly.
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Warlpiri: Contextual inference guides interpretation; speaker stance may be subtly embedded.
Effect: English allows for narrator commentary but is less constrained by grammatical modality. Hopi/Japanese stories signal certainty, perspective, and source within the grammar, influencing how events are interpreted by listeners.
Conclusion
By tracing narrative construal across languages, we see how linguistic ontologies shape the texture of experience itself:
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English narratives foreground discrete events, agency, and causal chains.
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Hopi and Warlpiri narratives foreground relationality, temporal/aspectual flow, and environmental embedding.
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Japanese narratives foreground topicality, perspective, and relational nuance, integrating social and epistemic information.
In other words, the lattice of a language’s semiotic distinctions extends into lived experience, guiding cognition, culture, and storytelling. The same potential field of phenomena can produce profoundly different narrative realities, all equally actualised through language.
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