Languages as Ontologies II: 1 Construal of Processes

When we say a language “describes” an event, we risk thinking it merely labels reality. Relational ontology asks us to suspend that assumption: languages do not mirror the world — they pattern what it is possible to experience and enact. In this sense, every language is a local theory of processes: a set of possibilities for how beings and phenomena may unfold, persist, or relate.

1. What counts as “doing” or “being”?

Different languages carve up the realm of action and existence in radically divergent ways:

• Aspectual structuring: Some languages, like Japanese, distinguish finely between completed, ongoing, and habitual processes through auxiliary constructions rather than simple tense. A single “verb” can encode nuances of unfolding experience that English spreads across multiple expressions.

• Event nominalisation: In some Salishan languages, what English treats as verbs are largely noun-like events. The act of “running” or “falling” is construed as a bounded phenomenon, an entity that participates in relational networks rather than a dynamic action carried out by an agent.

• Gestural / visual languages: American Sign Language (ASL) often allows a fluid shift between stative and eventive construal in the same predicate space; movement and space instantiate the process itself, not just the fact that it occurs.

The upshot: what counts as “process” is not universal. Some languages foreground unfolding and change, some relational configurations, others the intersection of participants and their affordances.

2. Process construal as ontology

By examining how languages grammaticalise or lexicalise processes, we see each patterning a default ontology of becoming:

• Dynamic unfolding (English, Japanese) — events are temporally structured, with attention to initiation, continuation, and completion.

• Event as bounded entity (Salishan) — processes are objects of attention; agency is distributed across relational nodes.

• Embodied enactment (ASL) — processes are co-actualised in space; the distinction between doing and being blurs into the movement itself.

This demonstrates a profound insight: the syntax, morphology, and semantics of verbs are not incidental. They are the linguistic crystallisation of what a speaker can experience as processual, shaping thought, narrative, and the very sense of causality.

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling: A language that foregrounds unfolding actions creates narratives attuned to change, suspense, and temporal sequencing. A language that treats processes as bounded entities frames experience around events as relational “happenings,” giving stories a contemplative, distributed quality.

• Cognition: Speakers internalise the patterns their language offers. The habitual focus on initiation, completion, or relational boundedness tunes attention differently, without determining it.

4. Closing reflection

In the relational-ontology view, process construal is not a matter of “correctly representing reality” — it is the patterned opening of possible worlds. English, Japanese, Salishan, and ASL do not describe the same universe differently; they enable different ways of inhabiting experience itself.

As we continue this series, we will see that participant construal, spatial anchoring, agency, and temporality follow a similar logic: every language is a lens through which existence is made legible, inhabitable, and narratable.