Saturday, 22 November 2025

Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 5 Typologies of Aspect and Temporality: How Languages Pattern Becoming

If transitivity is a language’s theory of impact, then aspect and temporality are its theory of becoming — how unfolding is cut, phased, intensified, or dissolved.

The usual typological approach lists contrasts:

  • perfective vs. imperfective

  • punctual vs. durative

  • telic vs. atelic

  • progressive, habitual, iterative

  • realis/irrealis

  • tense-rich vs. tenseless systems

But this parameterisation presupposes a metaphysics of time as an external dimension that language “encodes”.

A relational ontology rejects this.
Time is not an external axis waiting to be represented.
Temporality is a construal of unfolding — a way a system patterns experience so that becoming becomes a phenomenon.

Aspect and temporal systems are therefore ontological commitments about:

  • how phenomena endure,

  • how they shift,

  • how they phase,

  • how they resolve,

  • and how strongly a speaker commits to them.

Languages differ fundamentally in what they make possible to construe as temporal.

1. English: Temporality as Bounded Unfolding

English combines:

  • a tense-based anchor (past/present/future distinction)

  • a modest aspect system (progressive, perfect, habitual via adverbs)

This encodes an ontology in which:

  1. events are located on a notional timeline;

  2. unfolding is a deviation from completion (progressive vs. non-progressive);

  3. completion is a structural property (perfect construes “prior relevance”).

English temporality is thus:

  • locational,

  • bounded,

  • and asymmetrically oriented toward completion.

This is one possible theory of becoming.
It is not a universal.

2. Tenseless Languages: Temporality as Contextual Orientation

Many languages lack grammatical tense entirely.
This does not mean they lack temporality.
Instead, they pattern time as:

  • epistemic immediacy,

  • relevance to speech event,

  • degree of remoteness,

  • or phase structure.

The phenomenon is not located in a past or present.
It is cut via contextual salience.

Ontology encoded:

becoming is relative to the interaction, not to a timeline.

The event’s temporal identity arises from its relational position in discourse, not from a grammatical label.

3. Aspect-First Languages: Temporality as Internal Texture

Some languages foreground aspectual distinctions far more strongly than tense:

  • completive vs. incompletive

  • sequential vs. simultaneous

  • inceptive vs. terminative

  • diffuse vs. bounded

  • emergent vs. settled

In these systems, temporality is:

  • phase-driven,

  • internal to the event,

  • textured rather than located.

This encodes an ontology where:

becoming is internal differentiation, not external position.

The event is defined not by “when” it is, but by how it unfolds from within.

4. Languages That Construe Time as Cyclic, Not Linear

Some languages grammaticise:

  • cyclic recurrence,

  • seasonality,

  • periodicity,

  • ritual temporality.

This patterns an ontology where events are not discrete segments on a line but iterations of a relational cycle.

Becoming is rhythmic.
Phase is recurrent.
Identity is patterned through repetition rather than singular occurrence.

English cannot represent this without circumlocution.
Its grammar presupposes linear unfolding.

5. Languages That Encode Temporality Through Evidentiality and Modality

For many systems, temporal distance is tied to:

  • evidential source,

  • epistemic strength,

  • or degree of hypotheticality.

This yields a temporality where:

  • “past” can mean “inferred”,

  • “future” can mean “unwitnessed”,

  • and “present” can mean “directly accessible”.

Here, temporality is inseparable from the speaker’s relationship to the phenomenon.
Becoming is not simply unfolding; it is accessibility, certainty, stance.

Ontology encoded:

temporality = construal commitment.

6. Languages With Highly Granular Phase Systems

Some languages grammaticise:

  • transitional phases (approaching, about to begin)

  • disrupted phases (interrupted, prematurely stopped)

  • unstable phases (fluctuating, wavering)

  • scalar unfolding (low, medium, high intensity)

  • multiphase internal restructuring

These are not “fine-grained aspectual systems”.
They are linguistic ontologies in which:

  • experience is always in flux,

  • becoming is textured,

  • and the internal phase space of phenomena is richly available to construal.

A language that encodes “incipient but unstable” as a single morphological marker has built into its system a theory of what counts as a significant temporal texture.

7. Reframing Temporality in a Relational Ontology

Across languages, we see divergent temporal ontologies:

  • locational (English, Russian): time as addressable coordinates;

  • phase-driven (Mayan, many Austronesian systems): time as internal change;

  • cyclic (many Indigenous traditions): time as patterned recurrence;

  • epistemic (Tibetan, Quechuan, Athabaskan): time as stance;

  • configurational (tenseless systems): time as discourse position;

  • granular (aspect-maximal systems): time as micro-phasal texture.

None of these reflect different metaphysics of time “out there”.

They are semiotic architectures of how phenomena come into presence as unfolding.

Temporality is not external reality encoded.
It is an ontological cut: a way of shaping the becoming of phenomena so that unfolding is available to experience.

Typology becomes animated:

comparative theories of becoming.

Next Post

Post 6 will tackle Typologies of Evidential Construal — not merely cataloguing evidential systems, but showing how languages carve the boundary between experience, access, and phenomenon itself.

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