Processes unfold, participants act, and space situates them. Now we examine how events unfold through force, control, and responsibility. Languages do not merely label cause and effect — they pattern agency relationally, shaping how speakers attend to, reason about, and narrativize influence.
1. Agent prominence and syntactic alignment
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English: accusative; agents are default. Attention is foregrounded on who acts.
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Dyirbal / Basque: ergative; patient/event is often central. Agents may be backgrounded.
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Cognitive effect: habitual construal modulates attention to actors vs. events, influencing moral and causal reasoning.
2. Causative strategies
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Turkish: morphological causatives encode direct control.
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Japanese: analytic causatives encode indirect or relational influence.
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Speakers are tuned to degrees of control and relational mediation, shaping prediction and understanding of event dynamics.
3. Evidentiality and epistemic modulation
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Tibetan / Quechua: causal and evidential marking combine.
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The speaker encodes whether causation was directly observed, inferred, or reported.
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Cognitive payoff: habitual use of evidential marking structures attention, inference, and the epistemic weighting of participants’ influence.
4. Narrative implications
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English: linear causal chains, hero/villain arcs.
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Dyirbal: narratives emphasize event consequences; agents may recede.
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Turkish / Japanese: intentionality and relational control shape plot focus.
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Tibetan / Quechua: narratives foreground epistemic stance and causal inference.
Takeaway: Agency construal preconfigures narrative focus, moral reasoning, and relational attention.
5. Concluding Reflection
Languages pattern how influence, control, and responsibility are perceived. Habitual construal of agency:
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Tunes attention to actors, forces, and relational dynamics
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Structures memory of causation and outcomes
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Shapes expectation and prediction in narrative and reasoning
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Provides distinct cognitive and narrative horizons
Agency and causation are thus cognitive horizons of influence, shaping the perception and enactment of relational power in experience.
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