Typology traditionally proceeds as if languages are comparable objects arrayed along shared parameters—word order, alignment, morphological synthesis, clause-combining strategies, and so on. The discourse is clean, almost comfortingly so: features are isolable, combinable, and portable across descriptive traditions. But this cleanliness is an artefact of a particular construal of what “a language” is and how linguistic difference should be cut. The typological landscape is not discovered; it is instantiated through the lenses we bring.
The relational-ontological stance shifts the ground. What typology confronts is not a set of linguistic artefacts but different ways in which communities cut potential into meaning—different repertoires of construal that bring forth distinct horizons of experience. The “types” we identify are not properties of languages; they are perspectival regularities emergent from how meaning-making systems orient themselves to possibility.
Typology, under this lens, becomes a theory not of categories but of relational orientations.
1. The First Cut: From Structural Features to Construal Strategies
In the structuralist inheritance, typology sorts languages according to how they bundle information:
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Do they mark grammatical relations on nouns or verbs?
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Do they line up elements as SOV, SVO, or otherwise?
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Do they prefer subordination, coordination, or serialisation?
But these are merely surface symptoms of deeper construal logics—ways of distributing perspectival labour across the clause, across participants, or across events.
For example, rigid word order is not in principle a property of syntax but a commitment to perspectival linearity: a choice to stabilise the flow of construal through temporal ordering. Agglutination, similarly, is a commitment to modular approximation—breaking meaning potential into concatenable units that actualise together.
The typological shift, then, is from what the system does to how the system habitually construes.
2. The System as Structured Potential, Not Collection of Features
Within relational ontology, a “system” is not an inventory; it is a structured potential, a theory of its own possible instances. Typological difference reflects different potentials—not different objects, but different ways of configuring the threshold between system and instance.
This unlocks a deeper typological lens:
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Languages differ not primarily in symbols but in where they draw the constitutive cuts.
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Typological parameters become sites where meaning potential is shaped, not essential dimensions.
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Comparative work becomes the analysis of how systems coordinate their own instantiation.
Typology thus becomes a mapping of relational architectures, not feature bundles.
3. Horizons of Attention: How Communities Anchor Meaning
A language’s typological profile often reflects its community’s habitual orientation to the phenomenal world—the relational horizon that shapes what must be foregrounded, backgrounded, or stabilised in experience.
Some languages distribute attention across participants (ergative patterns), others across events (serialisation), others across viewpoint (directionals, switch-reference, evidentials). These are not eccentricities of grammar; they are worldmaking commitments.
4. The Typology of Cuts: Three Fundamental Orientations
Across the data, we repeatedly encounter three stabilised orientations, not as categories but as ways of cutting relational potential:
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Configurational Cuts
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Prioritising structural scaffolds: constituent order, head directionality, explicit hierarchy.
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Construal strategy: stabilise meaning through positional relations.
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Morphological Cuts
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Prioritising internal composition: affixal layering, fusion, agreement networks.
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Construal strategy: stabilise meaning through internal dependency.
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Discoursal Cuts
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Prioritising interactional flow: topic chains, switch-reference, prosodic phrasing.
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Construal strategy: stabilise meaning through unfolding context.
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Every language draws all three cuts, but the balance is typologically diagnostic—not because it represents a structural choice, but because it reveals how the system regulates its own instantiation.
5. Toward a New Typological Map
Once typology is understood not as classification but as analysing relational orientations, a new kind of map emerges:
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Not a map of types, but of tendencies.
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Not a grid of features, but a space of perspectival economies.
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Not a comparison of objects, but a comparison of semiotic becomings.
The typological landscape becomes an ecology of construal, and languages become different articulations of the becoming of meaning.
Conclusion: Typology After Representation
Typology, reconceived through relational ontology, is neither classificatory nor structural. It is the study of how communities cut possibility into meaning, how systems structure potential, and how instantiation is perspectivally organised.
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