Languages as Ontologies II: 2 Construal of Participants

If processes are the grammar of becoming, participants are the grammar of being. But again, relational ontology asks us to suspend the naïve assumption that entities exist as fixed “things” independent of our construal. Languages do not label objects; they pattern what it is possible to treat as a participant in experience.

1. What counts as an entity?

Languages vary dramatically in what they allow, require, or foreground as participants:

• Animacy hierarchies: In many Australian Aboriginal languages, grammatical marking distinguishes entities by relative animacy. Humans, animals, plants, and inanimates occupy different slots in the syntax — constraining how participants can act, be acted upon, or co-occur.

• Fluidity of noun–verb distinction: Yucatec Maya allows the same root to appear as a noun or a verb depending on context. “The tree” and “treeing” are not separate conceptual domains; they are perspectival cuts on the same phenomenon, highlighting relational flexibility rather than ontological fixity.

• Classificatory systems: Bantu noun class systems do not merely categorise; they pattern the participant’s role, agency, and relation to other entities. A “liquid” noun class signals relational affordances in ways that reshape how events and participants interlock.

• Definiteness, possession, number: In languages like Pirahã, number is optional and possession is encoded pragmatically rather than grammatically. A participant may exist as a relationally situated node, not as a discrete, countable object.

2. Participant construal as ontology

By observing participant marking and classificatory strategies, we see each language enact a default stance toward being:

• Stable entities (English, many Indo-European languages) — participants are discrete, countable, and manipulable; relationality is secondary.

• Emergent participants (Pirahã, some Mayan languages) — entities come into view through interaction; their “existence” is contingent on context and relational salience.

• Relational nodes (Bantu noun-class languages, Dyirbal) — participants are defined primarily by networked roles and interactions, rather than intrinsic properties.

These patterns shape how speakers experience causality, responsibility, and even empathy — all grounded in the way their language allows participants to exist and interact.

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling: A language that foregrounds stable participants creates narratives of possession, inheritance, and individual agency. A language treating participants as emergent fosters narratives of situational flux, co-arising roles, and relational contingency.

• Cognition: The habitual construal of entities shapes attention, memory, and prediction. Speakers learn to track what counts as a participant, who may act, and which relationships are central. This is not deterministic but pattern-shaping.

4. Closing reflection

Every language cuts reality along different axes of being. Construal of participants is not about mapping “objects” onto words but about making experience legible: defining what can be counted, related, possessed, or acted upon.

Together with process construal, this shows how languages pattern both action and being — the two pillars of lived experience. The next posts will explore space, agency, and temporality, revealing even more ways in which languages enable different worlds to be inhabited and narrated.