The Exile of Grammar: 5 Re-Inscribing Relation in Linguistics

Language as emergent, relational, and semiotic

The previous posts have traced the closures embedded in Chomskyan theory: Platonic grammar, Cartesian dualism, and anti-Darwinian fixity. These moves stabilised formal prediction but exiled relational dynamics, producing the so-called “hard problems” of language.

This final post takes the constructive turn: re-inscribing relation into our understanding of language.

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1. Grammar as Model, Not Substance

Universal Grammar has been treated as an ontological primitive, a pre-existing structure to be discovered. Relationally, this is a category error.

• Grammar is not a “thing” in the mind.

• UG is not a metaphysical object.

• What we call “syntactic competence” is a pattern of relational actualisations: tendencies, stabilisations, and recurring construals emerging from interaction.

The formal system remains valuable—but only as a model of potential, not as a mirror of ultimate reality.

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2. Language as Relational Practice

Language emerges in relation:

• Between speaker and listener,

• Across social and cultural contexts,

• Within temporally unfolding interactions.

Meaning, variation, and creativity are not peripheral anomalies. They are constitutive of the system. Grammar is a stabilised subset of these patterns, abstracted for analytic purposes but inseparable from the relational field that generates it.

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3. Restoring Perspective and Horizon

Relational ontology emphasises perspective and horizon:

• Perspective: language arises through situated, embodied participants, not as a disembodied system.

• Horizon: each interaction shapes what counts as possible, relevant, and meaningful.

Grammar is intelligible because it participates in relational dynamics. Syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and social context are co-actualised, not isolated.

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4. Interactive Construal

Acquisition, variation, and creativity become understandable as interactive construals:

• Children do not “set parameters” in isolation. They engage relational potentials.

• Speakers innovate and adapt in response to communicative constraints and opportunities.

• Variation is emergent, not a deviation from a Platonic ideal.

UG remains a useful analytic tool, but it is now a map of tendencies, not a blueprint of being.

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5. Language Science as Accountable Construal

Reframing in relational terms transforms the practice of linguistics:

• Objectivity is accountable construal, not erasure of horizon.

• Formal models are instruments, not metaphysical assertions.

• Explanation emerges from understanding relational processes, not discovering a pre-existing computational substance.

Science does not lose rigour; it gains coherence. It becomes responsive to the phenomena it studies, rather than projecting necessity onto them.

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6. Closing the Series

Relationally, language is:

• Semiotic: grounded in symbolic value and communicative alignment.

• Emergent: continuously shaped by social and interactional processes.

• Relational: intelligible only within a network of construals and perspectives.

The “hard problems” disappear not because they vanish from experience, but because their source—the exile of relation—is acknowledged.

Grammar is stabilised practice. UG is a model of tendencies. Language is a living, relational phenomenon.

Science, properly framed, is no longer a search for metaphysical primitives—it is the disciplined engagement with relation itself.