Languages as Ontologies II: Meta-Conclusion: Construal as the Architecture of Possibility

Across this series, we have moved deliberately: from processes to participants, from space to causation, from temporality to the internal–external cut. Each domain revealed how languages do not represent a pre-existing world but pattern the horizon of what can become a phenomenon.

This final post consolidates the architecture we have built.

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1. The Six Cuts as a System

Each domain is a different kind of ontological cut — a way of partitioning the potential of experience into intelligible phenomena.

• Process construal patterns how becoming unfolds.

• Participant construal patterns what may count as a being.

• Spatial construal patterns where phenomena can be located.

• Agency and causation construal patterns how force and influence flow.

• Temporal construal patterns how unfolding is rendered meaningful.

• Internal/external construal patterns what counts as access, evidence, and experience itself.

None of these construals describe reality.

They actualise different possible realities — different ways of cutting the continuum of experience into phenomena, relations, and horizons.

In relational ontology, this is the central point:

construal is world-making, not world-mapping.

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2. Construal is systemic, not additive

These six domains are not separate “features” of language.

They mutually condition each other.

A language with geocentric spatial anchoring tends also to pattern agency relationally.

A language with aspect-first temporality often foregrounds event structure over agentive control.

A language with strong evidentiality tends to reshape the internal/external cut itself.

Each system is a coherent orientation toward experience, a patterned potential.

Thus the ontology expressed by a language is not produced by single categories but by the whole configuration of construal strategies.

Languages are not bundles of features.

They are co-individuated systems of experience.

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3. What typology becomes under relational ontology

Traditional typology asks:

How do languages encode X?

Which assumes there is a single X “out there” being encoded.

Our series reframes the question:

How do languages constitute X as a phenomenon at all?

Different languages do not “encode” different versions of time, space, agency, or entities.

They enact different cuts that make different kinds of time, space, agency, and entities possible.

Typology thus becomes the comparative study of:

how languages actualise different ontological potentials.

This is not relativism — because all cuts are perspectival on the same underlying potential —

nor universalism — because no cut is privileged or foundational.

It is systemic perspectivism grounded in relational ontology.

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4. The narrative payoff: worlds made possible

Because language patterns construal, it patterns narrative.

Different languages open different narrative universes:

• Event-centred worlds

• Agent-centred worlds

• Geocentric worlds

• Cyclic worlds

• Worlds where emotion is distributed

• Worlds where evidence is structural

• Worlds where being is stable

• Worlds where being is emergent

These are not stylistic accents; they are ontological dramaturgies built into the meaning potential of each language.

A language shapes not merely how stories are told but what can be storied.

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5. Where this series leaves us

We end with a new sense of what linguistic diversity is:

not variation in coding, but variation in ontological patterning.

Every language:

• construes a different grammar of becoming,

• enacts a different architecture of experience,

• opens a different horizon of meaningfulness.

Languages differ not in what they “say,” but in the worlds they make inhabitable.

This is the core thesis the series has established.