The Clause and the Field of Relation

"Every clause is a cut across the becoming of possibility."

If relational ontology begins from the premise that relations between processes are foundational, then why does linguistics — and our construal of experience through language — centre so firmly on the clause? How can a single clause be the minimal meaningful unit, when the very being it construes is already interwoven, already relational?

At first glance, this looks like a contradiction: the ontology starts from relation, but the grammar starts from bounded articulation. Yet this tension dissolves when we see that the clause is not a fragment of an otherwise undivided flow, but a perspectival cut across that flow — a local construal of the wider relational topology in which all processes are entangled.

In other words, the clause is not a discrete thing imposed upon an uncut reality. It is the semiotic articulation of relation itself: a way of construing a relational field as if it could be locally stabilised, momentarily oriented, and made exchangeable in meaning.

The clause complex, by contrast, takes this one step closer to the ontological foundation. Clause complexes are configurations of dependency and expansion or projection — relations between clauses — and thus correspond more directly to the ontology’s primary field of interprocessual relation. The clause complex is where grammar reveals its relational heart: it is the grammar’s own enactment of the world’s relational architecture.

But the clause itself — as the minimal locus of meaning — is where relational potential gets focused. It marks a local condensation of interprocessual flux into an act of construal: an event in which the readiness of meaning becomes phenomenally available.

Thus, there is no contradiction at all. To say that reality is constituted by relations between processes is to affirm that the unit of construal — the clause — arises within and through those relations. The clause is not an exception to relational being; it is its linguistic signature.

Every clause, in its way, is a relational event — a local articulation of the world’s readiness to mean.

Seen in this light, The Becoming of Possibility is not simply the evolution of meaning, but the progressive articulation of relational potential into clause-like construals — ever finer, ever more reflexive acts of semiotic delimitation. Each stage in this evolution brings new ways of cutting the relational field, new ways for possibility itself to mean. The clause, then, is not merely linguistic; it is the ontological gesture of construal made manifest — the world, phrased.