The Becoming of Possibility: Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 2 Typologies of Relationality: The Architecture of Being, Having, and Identifying

Saturday, 22 November 2025

Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 2 Typologies of Relationality: The Architecture of Being, Having, and Identifying

If Post 1 examined how languages cut experience into events and participants, this post turns to an equally fundamental ontological question:

How do languages construe relations?

In the Hallidayan model, relational clauses are not a minor corner of grammar; they are the deep infrastructure of how a language construes classification, identification, possession, equation, attribution, and location. They form the backbone of metaphenomenal structure — the ways a system offers to carve the world into stable relations.

But languages disagree, in sometimes spectacular ways, about:

what counts as a relation,
how relations are encoded,
whether relations look like states, events, or configurations,
and how sharply (or whether) distinctions like being, having, locating, classifying, identifying are kept apart.

This post traces those divergences, not as exotic typological trivia, but as differences in theories of relationality actualised by grammar.

1. The Big Relational Cuts: English as a Baseline Theory

English enshrines a fairly rigid set of contrasts in its system:

Intensive vs. Circumstantial (being vs. situating)
Attributive vs. Identifying (classifying vs. equating)
Possessive (“X has Y”)
Existential (“there is X”)
Locative (“X is in Y”)

These appear “natural” only from inside the system.

From a relational-ontological perspective, they are one possible theory of stable relations:

being takes the form of identification or classification,
having is a distinct clause type,
location is circumstantial,
existence is clause-initial and often dummy-subject-mediated,
and the verb be functions as a grammatical hinge tying all this together.

This theory is not universal. It is a local architecture of the possible.

2. Languages That Collapse English’s Relational Cuts

Many languages do not distinguish “being”, “having”, and “existing” at all.

Possession as Location

In many languages (Uralic, Salishan, Tibetan, Oceanic, and others), clauses equivalent to English “X has Y” are construable only as locative configurations:

At X exists Y
With X is Y
To X belongs Y

This is not a syntactic curiosity.

It reflects a systemic theory in which possession is not a primary relation; it is a construal of spatial or configurational proximity.

In relational-ontological terms:

“having” is not a constitutive relation,
“position” becomes the deeper metaphenomenal category,
and “possession” is carved as a construal of configuration rather than ownership.

English hides this possibility by grammaticising possession as a distinct domain.

Other systems refuse to posit it at all.

3. Languages That Treat Identity as Event-Like

In many languages of the Americas, the Pacific, and elsewhere, identification can take on eventive morphology:

identity is construed as emergent,
classification can be encoded as a kind of state-change,
equative relations behave like processes rather than static facts.

In other words:

being can be construed as happening.

This is an ontological shift that English makes impossible.

English treats identity as stable, atemporal, intrinsic.

But other systems encode it as a relational actualisation, not a metaphysical anchor.

This matches beautifully with a relational ontology:

identification is a perspectival cut, not a metaphysical property;
a system that renders identification as eventive makes that explicit in grammar.

4. Languages That Erase the Copula (Because They Don’t Need It)

Languages that omit a copular verb (across large zones of East and Central Asia, the Pacific, and northern Australia) demonstrate something profound:

The system does not need a verb to make a relation.

That does not mean these languages are “simple”.

It means their system is built on a different theory of what relationality is:

relations can be construed configurationally,
stability can be encoded through nominal morphology,
identity can be signalled by adjacency or particle systems rather than verbs.

A copula is not a universal solution.

It is one way — English’s way — of construing a relation as a kind of minimal event.

Other systems construe relations as intrinsic configurations that do not require a verbal nucleus at all.

5. Languages That Merge Location and Existence

In English:

existence is existential (“there is X”),
location is circumstantial (“X is in Y”).

In many languages, these are one category:

X exists in Y
In Y is X
X is Y-located
sometimes simply X is (with spatiality inferred or marked elsewhere).

This reduces the metaphenomenal ontology to one domain:

existence = location = presence-in-configuration.

The English distinction between “being” and “being somewhere” collapses.

Presence becomes inherently situated.

Existence is not free-floating; it is always configurational.

Relationally, this fits perfectly with our model:

a phenomenon is not an entity that then acquires a location;

a phenomenon is its location within a construed configuration.

Some languages build that into the grammar itself.

6. Bringing It Together: Relationality as Systemic Ontology

Across languages, we see several ways of carving relationality:

as identity (equation, classification),
as configuration (location, possession-as-proximity),
as actualisation (eventive relations),
as presence (existence as situated),
or as absence of distinctions English fossilises.

None of these are metaphysically superior.

All are systemic affordances for construal.

And because construal = meaning = reality (first-order), each system enacts a different ontology of relation:

what it is to “be”,
to “have”,
to “belong”,
to “be somewhere”,
to “be something”.

Typology becomes, again, the comparative study of architectures of the possible.

Post 3 will examine Typologies of Valency — not in the naïve “argument-counting” sense, but as competing ontological theories of what it is for a participant to matter to an event, and how languages carve the boundary between intrinsic structure and configurational optionality.

The Becoming of Possibility