Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 7 The Typology of Perspective: How Languages Anchor the Cut

If typology is reoriented around relationality rather than representation, the next frontier is inevitable: perspective itself. For it is perspectival labour—how a system distributes the work of orientation, stance, attention, and involvement—that most fundamentally shapes the construal of experience.

Languages do far more than encode “who did what to whom.” They allocate semiotic responsibility. They sculpt lines of sight. They coordinate intersubjective alignment and intersubjective distance. And they do all this not through optional semantic colouring but through obligatory cuts that define what counts as an instance at all.

Typology of perspective is therefore not a taxonomy of evidentials, switch-reference markers, or voice systems. It is an analysis of how different languages constitute the conditions under which meaning becomes anchored.

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1. Perspective is Not Viewpoint: It is the Condition of Actualisation

In relational ontology, instantiation is a perspectival shift: the system’s potential becomes an event through the cut that makes it this meaning, here, now. Perspective is thus not a decorative add-on but is built into the very architecture of actualisation.

Different languages regulate this transition differently:

• Some require that the source of information be marked (obligatory evidentiality).

• Some require tracking of whose viewpoint grounds the clause (logophoricity).

• Some require tracking of continuity of subjects across clauses (switch-reference).

• Some assign perspectival centrality to animacy, topicality, empathy, or spatial anchoring.

The key is not the inventory but the obligation: the system insists that perspective be made semiotically visible.

This is the first typological horizon.

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2. Three Perspectival Economies

From a relational-ontological standpoint, the world’s languages display three recurrent orientations toward perspective. These are not categories; they are perspectival economies—stabilised patterns of where a system places the burden of orientation.

A. Participant-Centred Orientation

(Ergative splits, inverse systems, prominence hierarchies)

The cut is anchored in who is involved.

Semiotic responsibility is distributed according to animacy, empathy hierarchy, or pragmatic centrality. Events are construed through a relational profile: who outranks whom, who is perspectivally closer.

Such systems encode not “roles” but relative involvement. Agency becomes a gradient of perspectival intimacy.

B. Enunciative Orientation

(Evidentials, logophorics, speech-act anchoring)

The cut is anchored in who is speaking or perceiving.

The clause positions itself relative to a viewpoint-holder whose epistemic, perceptual, or attitudinal stance must be articulated. Perspective is not optional; it is the backbone of instantiation.

Meaning becomes a network of enunciative coordinates—not simply who says it, but from which horizon of experience the instance actualises.

C. Event-Centred Orientation

(Switch-reference, aspectual chaining, serialisation)

The cut is anchored in how events align.

Perspective flows along temporal, causal, or sequential lines, distributing attention across event-structure rather than participants or speaker stances. The system’s obligation is to track coherence of eventhood: continuity or discontinuity of subjects, boundaries of motion, phases of action.

Here, perspective is not a point but a trajectory.

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3. Perspective as Semiotic Regulation

What typology reveals, under this reframing, is that languages differ not in whether they mark perspective but where they place the regulatory demand.

Every system must ensure that instantiation is grounded—otherwise meaning would float unanchored. The difference is in which dimension the anchoring is enacted:

• Participant-centred systems ground meaning in relational roles.

• Enunciative systems ground meaning in epistemic stance.

• Event-centred systems ground meaning in processual coherence.

This distribution is not random; it is constitutive of how the community construes experience. It is a cultural ontology expressed through semiotic habit.

Perspective is not encoded; it is enforced.

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4. When Perspective Becomes Grammar

One of the most striking consequences of this reframing is that classical “grammatical categories” dissolve. The so-called categories—voice, evidentiality, topicality, directionals, event chaining—are just the morphological shadows of perspectival demands.

We see this most clearly in languages where perspective overruns the conventional typological inventory:

• Where empathy hierarchy dictates verb morphology.

• Where evidentiality is not a modal but the skeleton of the clause.

• Where logophoric pronouns become the locus of narrative structure.

• Where switch-reference regulates entire strings of clauses, not merely pronouns.

Perspective is grammar because grammar is the technology of perspectival actualisation.

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5. The Deeper Claim: Perspective and the Ecology of Meaning

The typology of perspective brings us to the core of relational typology:

Languages differ in where they cut into the ecology of relational life.

What they foreground, what they regulate, what they stabilise—these are not arbitrary choices but semiotic enunciations of the community’s lived horizon.

This is why typology matters: not to classify languages but to understand how different semiotic ecologies make different worlds possible.

Perspective is the hinge of possibility.

Where a language locates this hinge tells us how it orients to the becoming of meaning.

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Conclusion: After Perspective Comes Orientation

We now have three relational typologies:

• Typology of Construal

• Typology of Relational Cuts

• Typology of Perspective

Together they form a scaffold for a new typological science:

a typology of orientations, not structures.

The next post will take the natural next step:

Post 8 — The Typology of Orientation: How Languages Stabilise the Horizons of Experience