Ecological Narratology: 1 Narratives as Semiotic Ecologies

If languages are ontologies — structured potentials for construal — then narratives are not simply stories.

They are semiotic ecologies in action: coordinated instances in which construal, relationality, perspective, and orientation dynamically interact to bring phenomena into presence.

In short, storytelling is the actualisation of possibility. And the ways stories unfold are shaped by the semiotic architecture of the language itself.

This post introduces the idea and frames it through a familiar guide: Liora, whose small adventures through extraordinary landscapes provide a lens on how semiotic ecologies operate.

---

1. Narrative as Semiotic Actualisation

In relational-ontological terms, each clause in a narrative is an instance of construal. The system (language) offers potential structures; the narrative selects, sequences, and coordinates these potentials.

For Liora, walking through the dew-bright forest is more than an event in a story. It is a phenomenon brought into being through the choices of the narrative:

Liora paused beside the pool. The dew shimmered. In one frame, the pool was just water; in another, it began to hum with possibility. Her attention carved the world into phenomena.

Every descriptive choice — what is foregrounded, what remains in the horizon, how perspective is aligned — reflects the semiotic ecology of the language.

---

2. Construal in Narrative

Some languages emphasise events, making actions the driving force of stories. Others emphasise participants, making the character network central.

• In an event-driven construal, the pool itself might be the locus of the narrative: “The pool began to tremble as light gathered on its surface.”

• In a participant-driven construal, Liora’s movement, gaze, or attentional focus might dominate: “Liora leaned closer, sensing the shimmer.”

Both are valid; both actualise different semiotic ecologies.

---

3. Relationality in Narrative

Relational axes — classification, possession, identification — shape how story elements connect.

• The pool could be “just a pool,” or a “mirror of possibility,” or “the forest’s secret eye.”

• The creature hovering above it might be relationally marked in terms of interaction potential with Liora, rather than merely as a character.

Relational marking is not optional: it structures the intelligibility of the narrative. A semiotic ecology where relations are foregrounded will produce different story effects than one where events dominate.

---

4. Perspective in Narrative

Perspective regulates access, knowledge, and stance: from which horizon phenomena are perceived, and how much epistemic or experiential information is available.

• Liora might notice the pool first, then the creature, while the reader is aligned with her perspective.

• A narrative anchored elsewhere — the creature’s perspective, or an omniscient observer — changes what phenomena are salient and how tension is generated.

Perspective is built into the narrative ecology, not added later. It guides attention, expectation, and narrative alignment.

---

5. Orientation in Narrative

Orientation stabilises the narrative horizon: spatially, socially, or discursively.

• Spatial orientation: where the pool is in relation to Liora, the forest, the sunlight.

• Social orientation: the creature’s relation to Liora or the forest’s lore.

• Discursive orientation: how the narrative sequences events and maintains coherence across clauses.

Without orientation, phenomena float; with orientation, they become intelligible, grounded, and narratively compelling.

---

6. Liora as Lens

Liora’s small acts — pausing, observing, leaning — illustrate the four axes in action:

1. Construal: which events and participants are foregrounded

2. Relationality: how entities are linked, classified, or possessed

3. Perspective: whose viewpoint guides attention

4. Orientation: what horizon stabilises the meaning

Through her, we see narrative as an ecology, not just a sequence of sentences.

---

Next Post

We will dive deeper into Construal in Narrative, showing how eventhood, states, and participant salience shape storytelling across languages.

Liora will be our constant guide, letting us observe the semiotic ecology in action and making typological differences tangible without invoking determinism.

Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 9 Ecologies of the Possible: Toward a Relational Typology of Human Meaning

Across this series, we have treated languages not as representational codes but as ontological systems: structured potentials for bringing phenomena into presence.

With this final post, we lift from the level of typological detail to the horizon that holds everything together:

Languages do not describe worlds.

They enact ecologies of possibility.

A language is not a lens.

It is not a worldview.

It is not a cognitive style.

It is a semiotic ecology:

a system for stabilising horizons, cutting phenomena, organising relations, and positioning experiencers within ongoing flows of unfolding.

This post integrates the typological findings into a single relational model.

---

1. The Four Axes of Relational Typology

Through the series, we identified four generative axes:

(1) Construal

What the system makes available as a phenomenon.

This includes typological variation in eventhood, participanthood, stativity, force dynamics, causation, and the event–state continuum. Each language provides distinct affordances for what can appear as happening.

(2) Relationality

What kinds of structuring relations the system foregrounds.

This includes identification, classification, possession, existentiality, attributive relations, and the ways languages treat “being” not as a metaphysical category but as a family of construal options.

(3) Perspective

The vantage-point from which phenomena are brought into presence.

This includes evidentiality, access, sensory anchoring, viewpoint alignment, and the distribution of epistemic presence across experiencers.

(4) Orientation

The horizon that stabilises the phenomenon as intelligible.

This includes environmental anchoring, social-relational anchoring, and discursive/ textual anchoring — the “world-model” against which the phenomenon is made coherent.

Together, these axes form the relational architecture of a language’s meaning potential.

They do not explain cognition.

They do not prescribe metaphysics.

They describe how meaning becomes possible within a semiotic ecology.

---

2. Why This Framework Matters: Typology Without the Exoticism Trap

Traditional typology oscillates between two poles:

• structural taxonomy (“languages with ergative alignment…”)

• cultural essentialism (“they think differently because their language…”)

Relational typology avoids both.

We are not cataloguing structural quirks.

We are not romanticising difference.

We are analysing the patterned relational potentials through which phenomena can be actualised in first-order meaning.

A typology of the possible, not a typology of the exotic.

This allows us to compare languages without freezing them into metaphysical caricatures.

---

3. Languages as Ecological Strategies

Every language, as a semiotic ecology, answers four questions:

1. What counts as a phenomenon here?

2. Which relations make phenomena intelligible?

3. From where does experience unfold?

4. Against what horizon does it cohere?

Different languages give different answers — not because their speakers “see different worlds,” but because their systems regulate:

• what must be stabilised,

• what must be specified,

• what can be left ambiguous,

• and what relations constitute meaningful experience.

For example:

• Some languages stabilise everything environmentally.

• Some stabilise everything socially.

• Some stabilise everything textually.

• Some stabilise everything agentively.

• Some stabilise nothing except topic continuity.

• Some stabilise perspectival access above all else.

Each strategy constitutes a semiotic habitat — a way of inhabiting the world through meaning.

---

4. Horizons of the Possible: The Emergent Typological Landscape

When we map the four axes onto one another, we do not get typological “types.”

We get ecologies.

Some languages form clusters of:

• eventive–agentive–experiencer-first–environmentally anchored systems

• relational–stative–distributed perspective–textually anchored systems

• classification-heavy–possession-dominant–socially anchored systems

• minimal relational marking–rich perspective marking–horizon-light systems

• privileged participanthood–weak eventhood–topological orientation systems

These are not categories; they are relational attractors.

Languages gravitate toward certain stabilisation strategies because:

• they align with local interactional ecologies,

• they reinforce established narrative styles,

• they cohere with existing semiotic infrastructures,

• and they maintain learnability and communicative resilience.

In relational terms:

languages tend toward stable configurations of the possible.

---

5. The Final Claim: A Relational Science of Typology

We can now articulate the core insight of the entire series with final clarity:

Typology is the study of how languages regulate the emergence of phenomena.

Not grammar.

Not worldview.

Not encoded metaphysics.

Phenomena — as first-order meaning events — arise inside semiotic ecologies.

Languages differ in the ways they regulate this emergence.

This is a science not of representation but of ontological cut,

not of categories but of relational stabilisation,

not of grammar but of semiotic potential.

Relational typology becomes the study of how human communities make meaning possible through distinct but structurally comparable ecologies of the possible.

Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 8 The Typology of Orientation: How Languages Stabilise Horizons of Experience

If construal tells us what can become a phenomenon,

and perspective tells us from where it becomes one,

then orientation tells us toward what horizon the phenomenon is anchored.

Orientation is not spatial deixis, nor narrative viewpoint, nor semantic role.

It is the way a linguistic system stabilises the horizon that makes a phenomenon intelligible at all.

In a relational ontology, meaning does not pre-exist the cut; it comes into being as the structured presence of a phenomenon within a horizon of relevance. Orientation is the systemic machinery that stabilises that horizon.

Different languages regulate this stabilisation in strikingly different ways. This post sets out the major typological patterns.

---

1. Horizons Are Not Backgrounds: They Are Conditions of Meaning

Languages do not describe a world.

They enact horizons that make phenomena possible.

Orientation is therefore not an add-on. It is the semiotic infrastructure that allows a phenomenon to be coherent:

• where it belongs,

• how it is situated,

• what counts as its relevant environment,

• and how it participates in the ecology of relations.

Orientation is the system’s way of saying:

“This is the sort of phenomenon that makes sense here.”

Typologically, languages differ in what they treat as the primary stabilising horizon.

---

2. Three Primary Types of Orientation

Across the world’s semiotic ecologies, we see three major orientation paradigms. These are not categories but fields of stabilisation, each encoding what it is that must be made relationally definite for construal to actualise.

A. Spatial-Environmental Orientation

(Deictic fields, geocentric systems, topological grammars)

Some languages stabilise meaning by anchoring phenomena into environmental horizons:

• absolute direction systems (north/south/uphill/downwind)

• topological spatial grammars (“at-edge-of”, “in-interior-of”)

• environmental deixis tied to landscape

• orientation encoded obligatorily in motion, posture, and location verbs

Here, the clause becomes intelligible only when placed into a stable environmental relational frame. Horizon = world-space itself.

Meaning is anchored environmentally, not perspectivally.

B. Social-Relational Orientation

(Honorifics, relational categories, person-hierarchies)

Other languages stabilise phenomena through social horizon anchoring:

• honorific or humility systems

• kinship-indexing pronouns

• person hierarchies (e.g., “1>2>3” systems in verbal morphology)

• obligatory social deixis

In these systems, meaning is stabilised not by coordinates in space but by coordinates in social relational networks.

The phenomenon is coherent only when its position in the relational social field is made explicit.

Horizon = social topology.

C. Textual-Discursive Orientation

(Topic–comment systems, clause-chaining, obligatory discourse linkage)

Some languages stabilise meaning at the level of the evolving text itself:

• obligatory topic continuity

• clause chains where verbs depend on discourse-level anchoring

• systems where reference, tense, or aspect is subordinate to textual cohesion

• obligatory markers of discourse sequencing

Here, phenomena make sense only when stabilised within the unfolding texture of discourse. Meaning is anchored textually rather than socially or environmentally.

Horizon = discourse flow.

---

3. Mixed Systems and Hierarchies of Orientation

Real languages blend these horizons, but rarely with equal weight.

The typological question is: which horizon is systematically non-optional?

Examples:

• Some Papuan languages require continuous topic tracking (textually dominant) but also encode elaborate spatial anchoring (secondary environmental orientation).

• Some Himalayan languages code social-relational deixis as obligatory, with spatial deixis as facultative.

• Some Australian languages stabilise the clause environmentally first, socially second, and textually only minimally.

Orientation frameworks thus interact and stack, forming hierarchies of horizon.

A language’s typological identity lies in the ordering of these obligations.

---

4. Orientation as an Ontological Commitment (Without Metaphysics)

This reframing allows us to articulate the deeper claim cleanly:

Languages do not encode metaphysics.

They encode semiotic horizon selection.

A system’s orientation obligations reveal:

• what must be stable for meaning to actualise,

• what the community treats as the basic frame of intelligibility,

• what counts as a meaningful environment,

• which relations define the horizon of the possible.

These stabilisations are not reflections of cultural worldview.

They are the semiotic machinery through which a community brings phenomena into presence.

Orientation is the world-making substrate.

---

5. The Typology of Orientation Completes the Core Architecture

We now have the four foundational strata of a relational typology:

1. Construal — what becomes a phenomenon

2. Relationality — what structuring relations define the phenomenon

3. Perspective — from where the phenomenon becomes actual

4. Orientation — toward what horizon the phenomenon becomes coherent

These are not grammatical categories.

They are semiotic ontologies: architectures of possible meaning.

Together they constitute a full relational typological science.

---

Next Post

With orientation established, we are now positioned to complete the overarching arc with the capstone:

Post 9 — The Typology of Horizons: Cross-Linguistic Ecologies of the Possible

This final post will synthesise the entire system, showing how different typological orientations form ecologies of possibility—semiotic cosmologies enacted through everyday construal.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 6 Relational Horizons: Typology Beyond Categories

Typology traditionally proceeds as if languages are comparable objects arrayed along shared parameters—word order, alignment, morphological synthesis, clause-combining strategies, and so on. The discourse is clean, almost comfortingly so: features are isolable, combinable, and portable across descriptive traditions. But this cleanliness is an artefact of a particular construal of what “a language” is and how linguistic difference should be cut. The typological landscape is not discovered; it is instantiated through the lenses we bring.

The relational-ontological stance shifts the ground. What typology confronts is not a set of linguistic artefacts but different ways in which communities cut potential into meaning—different repertoires of construal that bring forth distinct horizons of experience. The “types” we identify are not properties of languages; they are perspectival regularities emergent from how meaning-making systems orient themselves to possibility.

Typology, under this lens, becomes a theory not of categories but of relational orientations.

---

1. The First Cut: From Structural Features to Construal Strategies

In the structuralist inheritance, typology sorts languages according to how they bundle information:

• Do they mark grammatical relations on nouns or verbs?

• Do they line up elements as SOV, SVO, or otherwise?

• Do they prefer subordination, coordination, or serialisation?

But these are merely surface symptoms of deeper construal logics—ways of distributing perspectival labour across the clause, across participants, or across events.

For example, rigid word order is not in principle a property of syntax but a commitment to perspectival linearity: a choice to stabilise the flow of construal through temporal ordering. Agglutination, similarly, is a commitment to modular approximation—breaking meaning potential into concatenable units that actualise together.

The typological shift, then, is from what the system does to how the system habitually construes.

---

2. The System as Structured Potential, Not Collection of Features

Within relational ontology, a “system” is not an inventory; it is a structured potential, a theory of its own possible instances. Typological difference reflects different potentials—not different objects, but different ways of configuring the threshold between system and instance.

This unlocks a deeper typological lens:

• Languages differ not primarily in symbols but in where they draw the constitutive cuts.

• Typological parameters become sites where meaning potential is shaped, not essential dimensions.

• Comparative work becomes the analysis of how systems coordinate their own instantiation.

Typology thus becomes a mapping of relational architectures, not feature bundles.

---

3. Horizons of Attention: How Communities Anchor Meaning

A language’s typological profile often reflects its community’s habitual orientation to the phenomenal world—the relational horizon that shapes what must be foregrounded, backgrounded, or stabilised in experience.

Some languages distribute attention across participants (ergative patterns), others across events (serialisation), others across viewpoint (directionals, switch-reference, evidentials). These are not eccentricities of grammar; they are worldmaking commitments.

Typology becomes the study of these commitments:

How does a system anchor attention? How does it carve relevance? How does it distribute semiotic responsibility?

---

4. The Typology of Cuts: Three Fundamental Orientations

Across the data, we repeatedly encounter three stabilised orientations, not as categories but as ways of cutting relational potential:

1. Configurational Cuts

   • Prioritising structural scaffolds: constituent order, head directionality, explicit hierarchy.

   • Construal strategy: stabilise meaning through positional relations.

2. Morphological Cuts

   • Prioritising internal composition: affixal layering, fusion, agreement networks.

   • Construal strategy: stabilise meaning through internal dependency.

3. Discoursal Cuts

   • Prioritising interactional flow: topic chains, switch-reference, prosodic phrasing.

   • Construal strategy: stabilise meaning through unfolding context.

Every language draws all three cuts, but the balance is typologically diagnostic—not because it represents a structural choice, but because it reveals how the system regulates its own instantiation.

---

5. Toward a New Typological Map

Once typology is understood not as classification but as analysing relational orientations, a new kind of map emerges:

• Not a map of types, but of tendencies.

• Not a grid of features, but a space of perspectival economies.

• Not a comparison of objects, but a comparison of semiotic becomings.

The payoff is substantial:

It becomes possible to connect typology with cognition, interaction, acquisition, and cultural practice—not as causal explanations but as parallel expressions of shared relational patterns.

The typological landscape becomes an ecology of construal, and languages become different articulations of the becoming of meaning.

---

Conclusion: Typology After Representation

Typology, reconceived through relational ontology, is neither classificatory nor structural. It is the study of how communities cut possibility into meaning, how systems structure potential, and how instantiation is perspectivally organised.

It is not about types of languages.

It is about types of relationality.

With the next post, we turn to the most contentious terrain of all:

The Typology of Perspective—how languages distribute viewpoint, agency, and stance in ways that constitute radically different relational worlds.

Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 5 Typologies of Aspect and Temporality: How Languages Pattern Becoming

If transitivity is a language’s theory of impact, then aspect and temporality are its theory of becoming — how unfolding is cut, phased, intensified, or dissolved.

The usual typological approach lists contrasts:

• perfective vs. imperfective

• punctual vs. durative

• telic vs. atelic

• progressive, habitual, iterative

• realis/irrealis

• tense-rich vs. tenseless systems

But this parameterisation presupposes a metaphysics of time as an external dimension that language “encodes”.

A relational ontology rejects this.

Time is not an external axis waiting to be represented.

Temporality is a construal of unfolding — a way a system patterns experience so that becoming becomes a phenomenon.

Aspect and temporal systems are therefore ontological commitments about:

• how phenomena endure,

• how they shift,

• how they phase,

• how they resolve,

• and how strongly a speaker commits to them.

Languages differ fundamentally in what they make possible to construe as temporal.

---

1. English: Temporality as Bounded Unfolding

English combines:

• a tense-based anchor (past/present/future distinction)

• a modest aspect system (progressive, perfect, habitual via adverbs)

This encodes an ontology in which:

1. events are located on a notional timeline;

2. unfolding is a deviation from completion (progressive vs. non-progressive);

3. completion is a structural property (perfect construes “prior relevance”).

English temporality is thus:

• locational,

• bounded,

• and asymmetrically oriented toward completion.

This is one possible theory of becoming.

It is not a universal.

---

2. Tenseless Languages: Temporality as Contextual Orientation

Many languages lack grammatical tense entirely.

This does not mean they lack temporality.

Instead, they pattern time as:

• epistemic immediacy,

• relevance to speech event,

• degree of remoteness,

• or phase structure.

The phenomenon is not located in a past or present.

It is cut via contextual salience.

Ontology encoded:

becoming is relative to the interaction, not to a timeline.

The event’s temporal identity arises from its relational position in discourse, not from a grammatical label.

---

3. Aspect-First Languages: Temporality as Internal Texture

Some languages foreground aspectual distinctions far more strongly than tense:

• completive vs. incompletive

• sequential vs. simultaneous

• inceptive vs. terminative

• diffuse vs. bounded

• emergent vs. settled

In these systems, temporality is:

• phase-driven,

• internal to the event,

• textured rather than located.

This encodes an ontology where:

becoming is internal differentiation, not external position.

The event is defined not by “when” it is, but by how it unfolds from within.

---

4. Languages That Construe Time as Cyclic, Not Linear

Some languages grammaticise:

• cyclic recurrence,

• seasonality,

• periodicity,

• ritual temporality.

This patterns an ontology where events are not discrete segments on a line but iterations of a relational cycle.

Becoming is rhythmic.

Phase is recurrent.

Identity is patterned through repetition rather than singular occurrence.

English cannot represent this without circumlocution.

Its grammar presupposes linear unfolding.

---

5. Languages That Encode Temporality Through Evidentiality and Modality

For many systems, temporal distance is tied to:

• evidential source,

• epistemic strength,

• or degree of hypotheticality.

This yields a temporality where:

• “past” can mean “inferred”,

• “future” can mean “unwitnessed”,

• and “present” can mean “directly accessible”.

Here, temporality is inseparable from the speaker’s relationship to the phenomenon.

Becoming is not simply unfolding; it is accessibility, certainty, stance.

Ontology encoded:

temporality = construal commitment.

---

6. Languages With Highly Granular Phase Systems

Some languages grammaticise:

• transitional phases (approaching, about to begin)

• disrupted phases (interrupted, prematurely stopped)

• unstable phases (fluctuating, wavering)

• scalar unfolding (low, medium, high intensity)

• multiphase internal restructuring

These are not “fine-grained aspectual systems”.

They are linguistic ontologies in which:

• experience is always in flux,

• becoming is textured,

• and the internal phase space of phenomena is richly available to construal.

A language that encodes “incipient but unstable” as a single morphological marker has built into its system a theory of what counts as a significant temporal texture.

---

7. Reframing Temporality in a Relational Ontology

Across languages, we see divergent temporal ontologies:

• locational (English, Russian): time as addressable coordinates;

• phase-driven (Mayan, many Austronesian systems): time as internal change;

• cyclic (many Indigenous traditions): time as patterned recurrence;

• epistemic (Tibetan, Quechuan, Athabaskan): time as stance;

• configurational (tenseless systems): time as discourse position;

• granular (aspect-maximal systems): time as micro-phasal texture.

None of these reflect different metaphysics of time “out there”.

They are semiotic architectures of how phenomena come into presence as unfolding.

Temporality is not external reality encoded.

It is an ontological cut: a way of shaping the becoming of phenomena so that unfolding is available to experience.

Typology becomes animated:

comparative theories of becoming.

---

Next Post

Post 6 will tackle Typologies of Evidential Construal — not merely cataloguing evidential systems, but showing how languages carve the boundary between experience, access, and phenomenon itself.

Languages as Ontologies III – Deep Dives: 4 Typologies of Transitivity: How Languages Pattern Impact, Change, and Commitment

So far in this deep-dive series, we have examined:

• how languages carve events (Post 1),

• how they construe relationality (Post 2),

• how they theorise participation (Post 3).

Now we turn to transitivity — one of the most misinterpreted concepts in typology and a perfect site to expose how languages encode ontologies of impact.

Transitivity is typically reduced to a checklist:

• number of participants

• volitionality

• aspect

• agency

• individuation

• affectedness

This tradition treats transitivity as an inventory of parameters describing “how eventful” a clause is.

But this is a representational misunderstanding.

In a relational ontology, transitivity is the system’s theory of how phenomena register force, change, and commitment.

Different languages pattern:

• what counts as a change,

• what counts as an impact,

• what counts as involvement,

• and how tightly experience is cut into committed, consequential phases.

This post reframes transitivity not as mechanics but as semiotic ontology.

---

1. English: Transitivity as Impact Encoded in Participant Structure

English construes transitivity primarily through two interacting strategies:

1. structural: two-participant clauses are inherently more “transitive”;

2. lexical: some verbs come packaged with high-impact event types (break, kill, push).

This means English embeds an ontology where:

• impact is tied to participant configuration,

• events are judged by who affects whom,

• high transitivity = clear, forceful, externally caused change.

This is a very particular metaphenomenal commitment:

impact = energy directed from A to B.

Many languages reject this entirely.

---

2. Languages Where Transitivity Is a Matter of Internal Event Structure

Some systems do not ground transitivity in participants at all.

Instead, they pattern internal event texture:

• Is the event bounded or unbounded?

• Does it achieve a culmination?

• Is the change reversible, repeatable, or diffuse?

• Is the event internally homogeneous or phase-structured?

In such systems, a clause with one participant can be “more transitive” than a two-participant clause if it enacts:

• a sharper boundary,

• a stronger internal phase shift,

• or higher commitment to the culmination.

Ontology encoded:

impact is internal differentiation, not external force.

---

3. Languages That Encode Transitivity as Epistemic Commitment

In many languages across the Americas, the Himalayas, and the Pacific, transitivity correlates with:

• evidentiality,

• speaker stance,

• event certainty,

• or degree of commitment to an event’s actuality.

Transitivity becomes:

• a marker of how strongly the speaker construes the phenomenon,

• not of how forcefully participants interact.

This yields an ontology where:

impact = strength of construal, not strength of force.

English cannot do this because it ties transitivity to event-internal relations, not interactional commitment.

---

4. Languages That Pattern Transitivity Through Affectedness Gradients

Rather than binary distinctions (in/transitive), many systems encode graded affectedness:

• minimal,

• partial,

• maximal,

• total.

Affectedness may be marked on:

• the verb,

• the patient,

• the agent,

• or by distributed morphological cues across the clause.

This encodes an ontology in which:

• impact is scalar,

• change is a gradient,

• causation has texture,

• and involvement is topological rather than categorical.

In such systems, “transitivity” is not about structural roles but relative degrees of experiential transformation.

---

5. Languages With Split or Fluid Transitivity Systems

Some languages dynamically shift between low- and high-transitivity patterns based on:

• aspect,

• volitionality,

• control,

• aktionsart,

• animacy,

• or discourse alignment.

This is not “irregularity”.

It is the grammar encoding the insight that:

impact is perspectival.

The same phenomenon can be construed as:

• an uncommitted occurrence,

• a controlled action,

• a forceful impact,

• a diffuse unfolding,

depending on how the speaker cuts the situation.

Transitivity = the language’s way of letting speakers tune the ontology of the phenomenon.

---

6. Languages With No Transitivity Distinction at All

Certain languages render transitivity meaningless:

• verbs do not encode argument structure,

• participants are not slot-governed,

• change is encoded elsewhere (e.g. aspectual clitics, serial verbs, discourse operators).

Here, the ontology rejects “impact” as a grammatical primitive.

Instead:

• relations are fluid,

• change is contextual,

• involvement is relationally distributed,

• and event structure emerges from broader discourse choreography.

This is an ontology of experience as non-modular, where impact cannot be localized to a clause-internal unit.

---

7. Reframing Transitivity in a Relational Ontology

Transitivity is not a measure of force.

It is a set of systemic affordances for construing how phenomena register change.

Different languages actualise different theories of impact:

• causal: events arise from directed force.

• configurational: events emerge from participant arrangements.

• internalist: events are internally textured changes.

• epistemic: impact is commitment.

• topological: affectedness is graded.

• distributed: change emerges across discourse.

These are not metaphysical beliefs.

They are semiotic architectures — theories of how phenomena can be brought into patterned experience.

Typology, within relational ontology, becomes:

the study of how languages carve the felt texture of change.

---

Next Post

Post 5 will take up Typologies of Aspect and Temporality — moving past temporal representation to examine how languages pattern unfolding, continuity, phase, and the very ontology of becoming.