Typological Construal Strategies: 2 Participant Construal Across Languages

Having explored process contrasts, we now examine how languages pattern what counts as a participant — what may act, be acted upon, or even “exist” within the horizon of experience. Relational ontology reminds us: participants are relational nodes, not pre-given objects. Typology reveals how languages actualise different participant ontologies.

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1. Animacy hierarchies: Dyirbal vs. English

Dyirbal, an Australian Aboriginal language, implements a grammatical animacy hierarchy: humans, animals, plants, and inanimates occupy distinct noun classes.

• Agents and patients are constrained by this hierarchy.

• Some classes trigger obligatory morphological marking; others are backgrounded.

Contrast with English: English treats all participants as countable nouns with broadly uniform syntactic behavior, foregrounding agency and individuation.

Typological insight: Dyirbal actualises a relational ontology of participant salience, where existence and role are patterned by hierarchies of relevance, not intrinsic substance.

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2. Noun–verb fluidity: Yucatec Maya

In Yucatec Maya, roots may appear as nouns or verbs depending on context:

• Ka’anal can mean “corn” (noun) or “to corn” (event/process).

• Participants and processes emerge through relational construal, not fixed categories.

Typological insight: Participanthood is emergent and context-sensitive, highlighting flexibility in what counts as a being or agent in a given construal.

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3. Classificatory systems: Bantu noun classes

Bantu languages categorize nouns into multiple classes (often 10–20), marking not just physical properties but roles, relational affordances, and event participation:

• Classes govern verb agreement, possessive constructions, and pluralization.

• Participants are defined through their systemic relations, not independent identity.

Typological insight: Bantu languages implement a networked ontology of participants, where being is a function of relational role rather than intrinsic essence.

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4. Cross-linguistic comparison: key contrasts

Feature	English	Dyirbal	Yucatec Maya	Bantu Languages
Default individuation	Discrete nouns	Class-hierarchic	Contextual	Class- and relation-based
Role of agency	Uniform	Constrained	Emergent	Relationally defined
Flexibility of participanthood	Low	Moderate	High	High
Morphological marking	Minimal	Obligatory	Optional/contextual	Extensive
Ontological emphasis	Stable entities	Hierarchical	Emergent	Networked roles

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5. Cognitive and narrative consequences

• English speakers: narratives foreground discrete characters, agency, and individual actions.

• Dyirbal speakers: narratives foreground the relational importance of participants according to salience hierarchies.

• Yucatec Maya speakers: narratives flexibly shift participants into processes, blurring boundaries between being and action.

• Bantu speakers: narratives integrate participant roles into the relational web of the story; entities exist through their connections.

Cognition: The habitual construal of participants shapes attention, memory, and relational reasoning, tuning speakers to notice different participants and their potential roles.

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6. Concluding reflection

Typology demonstrates that participant construal is ontologically potent: languages do not simply label “things” — they pattern what may count as a participant, how it may act, and how it may be positioned in relational networks.

From this foundation, we are now poised to explore spatial construal strategies, where languages pattern where phenomena exist in relation to each other and the speaker, opening further ontological possibilities.

Typological Construal Strategies: 1 Process Contrasts Across Languages

In our foundational series, we established that process construal is not a labelling device; it is the way a language opens a horizon of becoming. Now, in the typological deep dive, we examine how different languages actualise this horizon, revealing distinct patterns of processual experience.

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1. Aspectual finesse: Japanese vs. English

English marks aspect relatively simply: I eat / I ate / I am eating. Temporal location dominates; internal structure of the event is secondary.

Japanese, in contrast, has a highly structured aspectual system:

• -te iru signals ongoing or resultant states.

• -ta signals completion, but completion is not merely “past”; it modulates how the event is experienced.

• Habituality and potentiality are morphologically marked, allowing multiple simultaneous construals of unfolding.

Typological insight: Japanese actualises a multi-dimensional event horizon where processes are sliced along axes of completion, persistence, and potentiality, not merely chronological sequence.

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2. Event-as-entity: Coast Salish languages

In languages such as Lushootseed, events often behave like nominal entities. “Running” or “falling” is treated grammatically as an object, not primarily as an agent-driven action.

• Agency is optional, relational roles are foregrounded.

• Events can be combined, possessed, or quantified like nouns.

Typological insight: Salishan languages reorient attention from actors to processes as relational nodes, producing a default ontology in which becoming is bounded, relational, and modular.

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3. Embodied process: American Sign Language (ASL)

ASL expresses processes through movement, space, and simultaneity:

• A single sign can encode agent, action, direction, and result simultaneously.

• Repetition, size, and trajectory modulate processual meaning.

Typological insight: ASL actualises processes as spatially and temporally co-present phenomena, blending doing, being, and relational effect into one gestural horizon.

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4. Cross-linguistic comparison: key contrasts

Feature	English	Japanese	Salishan	ASL
Primary axis	Temporal	Aspectual	Nominal-event	Spatial-embodied
Agency	Foregrounded	Contextual	Optional	Encoded via movement
Process individuation	Linear events	Multi-dimensional	Bounded events	Co-actualised event space
Event relationality	Low	Moderate	High	High
Experiential salience	Agent & tense	Aspect & result	Event itself	Whole gestalt

The table demonstrates that processual construal is not uniform. Each language actualises different possibilities for experience, shaping how speakers attend to, remember, and narrate events.

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5. Cognitive and narrative consequences

• English speakers: narratives emphasize agentive action, chronological sequence, and causal chains.

• Japanese speakers: narratives foreground event structure, habituality, and process completion nuances.

• Salishan speakers: narratives highlight relations between events and participants; agency is backgrounded.

• ASL users: narratives integrate simultaneity, embodiment, and spatial relationality, producing a narrative rhythm that is multi-dimensional rather than linear.

Cognition: Speakers internalise the default horizon their language makes salient, tuning attention and memory to the patterns their process construal permits.

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6. Concluding reflection

Typological comparison reveals that process construal is ontologically potent.

Languages do not simply “say the same thing differently”; they shape what counts as a process, how it unfolds, and how it can be experienced.

This sets the stage for the next deep-dive post: Participant Construal Strategies Across Languages, where we examine how different languages actualise being itself, and how participants are patterned, bounded, and relationally anchored.