Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 4 Typologies of Transitivity: How Languages Pattern Impact, Change, and Commitment

So far in this deep-dive series, we have examined:

• how languages carve events (Post 1),

• how they construe relationality (Post 2),

• how they theorise participation (Post 3).

Now we turn to transitivity — one of the most misinterpreted concepts in typology and a perfect site to expose how languages encode ontologies of impact.

Transitivity is typically reduced to a checklist:

• number of participants

• volitionality

• aspect

• agency

• individuation

• affectedness

This tradition treats transitivity as an inventory of parameters describing “how eventful” a clause is.

But this is a representational misunderstanding.

In a relational ontology, transitivity is the system’s theory of how phenomena register force, change, and commitment.

Different languages pattern:

• what counts as a change,

• what counts as an impact,

• what counts as involvement,

• and how tightly experience is cut into committed, consequential phases.

This post reframes transitivity not as mechanics but as semiotic ontology.

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1. English: Transitivity as Impact Encoded in Participant Structure

English construes transitivity primarily through two interacting strategies:

1. structural: two-participant clauses are inherently more “transitive”;

2. lexical: some verbs come packaged with high-impact event types (break, kill, push).

This means English embeds an ontology where:

• impact is tied to participant configuration,

• events are judged by who affects whom,

• high transitivity = clear, forceful, externally caused change.

This is a very particular metaphenomenal commitment:

impact = energy directed from A to B.

Many languages reject this entirely.

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2. Languages Where Transitivity Is a Matter of Internal Event Structure

Some systems do not ground transitivity in participants at all.

Instead, they pattern internal event texture:

• Is the event bounded or unbounded?

• Does it achieve a culmination?

• Is the change reversible, repeatable, or diffuse?

• Is the event internally homogeneous or phase-structured?

In such systems, a clause with one participant can be “more transitive” than a two-participant clause if it enacts:

• a sharper boundary,

• a stronger internal phase shift,

• or higher commitment to the culmination.

Ontology encoded:

impact is internal differentiation, not external force.

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3. Languages That Encode Transitivity as Epistemic Commitment

In many languages across the Americas, the Himalayas, and the Pacific, transitivity correlates with:

• evidentiality,

• speaker stance,

• event certainty,

• or degree of commitment to an event’s actuality.

Transitivity becomes:

• a marker of how strongly the speaker construes the phenomenon,

• not of how forcefully participants interact.

This yields an ontology where:

impact = strength of construal, not strength of force.

English cannot do this because it ties transitivity to event-internal relations, not interactional commitment.

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4. Languages That Pattern Transitivity Through Affectedness Gradients

Rather than binary distinctions (in/transitive), many systems encode graded affectedness:

• minimal,

• partial,

• maximal,

• total.

Affectedness may be marked on:

• the verb,

• the patient,

• the agent,

• or by distributed morphological cues across the clause.

This encodes an ontology in which:

• impact is scalar,

• change is a gradient,

• causation has texture,

• and involvement is topological rather than categorical.

In such systems, “transitivity” is not about structural roles but relative degrees of experiential transformation.

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5. Languages With Split or Fluid Transitivity Systems

Some languages dynamically shift between low- and high-transitivity patterns based on:

• aspect,

• volitionality,

• control,

• aktionsart,

• animacy,

• or discourse alignment.

This is not “irregularity”.

It is the grammar encoding the insight that:

impact is perspectival.

The same phenomenon can be construed as:

• an uncommitted occurrence,

• a controlled action,

• a forceful impact,

• a diffuse unfolding,

depending on how the speaker cuts the situation.

Transitivity = the language’s way of letting speakers tune the ontology of the phenomenon.

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6. Languages With No Transitivity Distinction at All

Certain languages render transitivity meaningless:

• verbs do not encode argument structure,

• participants are not slot-governed,

• change is encoded elsewhere (e.g. aspectual clitics, serial verbs, discourse operators).

Here, the ontology rejects “impact” as a grammatical primitive.

Instead:

• relations are fluid,

• change is contextual,

• involvement is relationally distributed,

• and event structure emerges from broader discourse choreography.

This is an ontology of experience as non-modular, where impact cannot be localized to a clause-internal unit.

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7. Reframing Transitivity in a Relational Ontology

Transitivity is not a measure of force.

It is a set of systemic affordances for construing how phenomena register change.

Different languages actualise different theories of impact:

• causal: events arise from directed force.

• configurational: events emerge from participant arrangements.

• internalist: events are internally textured changes.

• epistemic: impact is commitment.

• topological: affectedness is graded.

• distributed: change emerges across discourse.

These are not metaphysical beliefs.

They are semiotic architectures — theories of how phenomena can be brought into patterned experience.

Typology, within relational ontology, becomes:

the study of how languages carve the felt texture of change.

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Next Post

Post 5 will take up Typologies of Aspect and Temporality — moving past temporal representation to examine how languages pattern unfolding, continuity, phase, and the very ontology of becoming.