Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 9 Ecologies of the Possible: Toward a Relational Typology of Human Meaning

Across this series, we have treated languages not as representational codes but as ontological systems: structured potentials for bringing phenomena into presence.

With this final post, we lift from the level of typological detail to the horizon that holds everything together:

Languages do not describe worlds.

They enact ecologies of possibility.

A language is not a lens.

It is not a worldview.

It is not a cognitive style.

It is a semiotic ecology:

a system for stabilising horizons, cutting phenomena, organising relations, and positioning experiencers within ongoing flows of unfolding.

This post integrates the typological findings into a single relational model.

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1. The Four Axes of Relational Typology

Through the series, we identified four generative axes:

(1) Construal

What the system makes available as a phenomenon.

This includes typological variation in eventhood, participanthood, stativity, force dynamics, causation, and the event–state continuum. Each language provides distinct affordances for what can appear as happening.

(2) Relationality

What kinds of structuring relations the system foregrounds.

This includes identification, classification, possession, existentiality, attributive relations, and the ways languages treat “being” not as a metaphysical category but as a family of construal options.

(3) Perspective

The vantage-point from which phenomena are brought into presence.

This includes evidentiality, access, sensory anchoring, viewpoint alignment, and the distribution of epistemic presence across experiencers.

(4) Orientation

The horizon that stabilises the phenomenon as intelligible.

This includes environmental anchoring, social-relational anchoring, and discursive/ textual anchoring — the “world-model” against which the phenomenon is made coherent.

Together, these axes form the relational architecture of a language’s meaning potential.

They do not explain cognition.

They do not prescribe metaphysics.

They describe how meaning becomes possible within a semiotic ecology.

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2. Why This Framework Matters: Typology Without the Exoticism Trap

Traditional typology oscillates between two poles:

• structural taxonomy (“languages with ergative alignment…”)

• cultural essentialism (“they think differently because their language…”)

Relational typology avoids both.

We are not cataloguing structural quirks.

We are not romanticising difference.

We are analysing the patterned relational potentials through which phenomena can be actualised in first-order meaning.

A typology of the possible, not a typology of the exotic.

This allows us to compare languages without freezing them into metaphysical caricatures.

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3. Languages as Ecological Strategies

Every language, as a semiotic ecology, answers four questions:

1. What counts as a phenomenon here?

2. Which relations make phenomena intelligible?

3. From where does experience unfold?

4. Against what horizon does it cohere?

Different languages give different answers — not because their speakers “see different worlds,” but because their systems regulate:

• what must be stabilised,

• what must be specified,

• what can be left ambiguous,

• and what relations constitute meaningful experience.

For example:

• Some languages stabilise everything environmentally.

• Some stabilise everything socially.

• Some stabilise everything textually.

• Some stabilise everything agentively.

• Some stabilise nothing except topic continuity.

• Some stabilise perspectival access above all else.

Each strategy constitutes a semiotic habitat — a way of inhabiting the world through meaning.

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4. Horizons of the Possible: The Emergent Typological Landscape

When we map the four axes onto one another, we do not get typological “types.”

We get ecologies.

Some languages form clusters of:

• eventive–agentive–experiencer-first–environmentally anchored systems

• relational–stative–distributed perspective–textually anchored systems

• classification-heavy–possession-dominant–socially anchored systems

• minimal relational marking–rich perspective marking–horizon-light systems

• privileged participanthood–weak eventhood–topological orientation systems

These are not categories; they are relational attractors.

Languages gravitate toward certain stabilisation strategies because:

• they align with local interactional ecologies,

• they reinforce established narrative styles,

• they cohere with existing semiotic infrastructures,

• and they maintain learnability and communicative resilience.

In relational terms:

languages tend toward stable configurations of the possible.

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5. The Final Claim: A Relational Science of Typology

We can now articulate the core insight of the entire series with final clarity:

Typology is the study of how languages regulate the emergence of phenomena.

Not grammar.

Not worldview.

Not encoded metaphysics.

Phenomena — as first-order meaning events — arise inside semiotic ecologies.

Languages differ in the ways they regulate this emergence.

This is a science not of representation but of ontological cut,

not of categories but of relational stabilisation,

not of grammar but of semiotic potential.

Relational typology becomes the study of how human communities make meaning possible through distinct but structurally comparable ecologies of the possible.