Languages as Ontologies II: 4 Construal of Agency and Causation

Processes unfold and participants exist, but how events happen — who acts, who influences, and how change occurs — is patterned differently across languages. Relational ontology asks: languages do not merely “mark who did what”; they pattern the distribution of force, responsibility, and potentiality.

1. How events unfold

Languages encode causation and agency in diverse, revealing ways:

• Ergativity vs. accusativity: Languages like Dyirbal or Basque mark agents and patients differently, creating a construal where agency is not the default; focus falls on the participant experiencing change. In contrast, English foregrounds the agent, creating a default of active causation.

• Causative morphology vs. analytic causation: In Turkish, causative affixes can transform a verb to signal intentional influence (“The chef boiled the water” vs. “The chef made the water boil”), embedding degrees of control and participation directly into the verb.

• Grammaticalised control, intention, and evidentiality: Languages like Tibetan integrate evidential markers with agency, signaling whether an event is observed, inferred, or reported — a subtle ontological statement about the speaker’s relation to the causal chain.

• Downplayed vs. foregrounded agency: Some languages, such as Japanese, often leave the agent implicit, shifting focus to the event itself or the relational network in which it occurs.

2. Agency construal as ontology

By examining how languages encode causation, we see contrasting ontological defaults:

• Agent-centered (English, many Indo-European languages) — the world unfolds around doers and their intentionality.

• Event-centred (Dyirbal, Salishan) — processes are primary; agents are sometimes peripheral or backgrounded.

• Relationally distributed (Tibetan, Japanese) — causality is mediated across participants, evidential access, and situational salience.

Language here does not “represent” causation neutrally; it structures how force, change, and responsibility are perceptible and narratable.

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling: Agent-focused languages favor heroes, villains, and deliberate action; event-focused or relationally distributed languages foreground unfolding situations, context, and emergent consequences.

• Cognition: Speakers learn to track causal chains differently — predicting, attributing, and experiencing agency in ways that align with their language’s patterns. These patterns shape moral reasoning, narrative expectation, and attention to force.

4. Closing reflection

Languages carve causality and agency in distinct ways. They are ontological instruments, not mirrors: each construal makes certain relationships salient while backgrounding others. The distribution of force, intentionality, and consequence is as much a product of linguistic patterning as of the “world itself.”

With processes, participants, spatial positioning, and agency outlined, we are now poised to explore time and temporality — how languages pattern unfolding not just in space and causation, but in becoming itself.