Typological Construal Strategies: 5 Temporal Construal Across Languages

Processes, participants, space, and causation establish what happens, who is involved, where it occurs, and how force flows. Now we examine how events are patterned in time — how languages actualise becoming itself. Relational ontology reminds us: temporality is not a neutral sequence; it is structured by construal.

---

1. Tensed vs. tenseless systems

• English and Romance languages: heavily tensed; past, present, and future are obligatorily marked.

  • Events are placed along a linear timeline.

• Pirahã and Yucatec Maya: tenseless; temporal interpretation relies on aspect, context, or evidentiality.

  • Temporal relations are emergent, relational, and context-dependent.

Typological insight: Tense marking shapes the default horizon of experience, while tenseless systems foreground relational and event-based temporal construal.

---

2. Aspect and event structure

• Slavic languages: aspect dominates.

  • Perfective vs. imperfective distinguishes completed vs. ongoing events, regardless of clock time.

  • Eventualities are perceived in terms of internal temporal structure.

• Japanese: aspect interacts with modality and habituality, creating multi-dimensional temporal perspectives.

Typological insight: Aspectual systems structure the quality of unfolding, not merely its placement on a timeline.

---

3. Cyclical, spatial, or phase-based time

• Amharic and other languages in Africa and Oceania encode time via repetition, cyclicity, or spatial metaphors.

  • Events are placed relative to phases, seasons, or recurring patterns.

  • Temporality is relational, patterned by experience rather than abstract linearity.

Typological insight: Time is a horizon of relational potential, not a universal metric.

---

4. Cross-linguistic comparison: key contrasts

Feature	English	Slavic	Japanese	Pirahã/Yucatec Maya	Amharic/other cyclic
Temporal marking	Obligatory	Aspect-focused	Aspect+modal	Contextual/tenseless	Phase/cycle-based
Primary axis of construal	Linear	Event-internal	Multi-dimensional	Relational/context	Cyclic/patterned
Event segmentation	High	Moderate	Moderate	Emergent	Relational
Chronological emphasis	Strong	Moderate	Moderate	Low	Low
Experiential salience	Sequence	Completion	Habituality	Relational	Recurrence/pattern

---

5. Cognitive and narrative consequences

• English speakers: narratives emphasize sequential cause and effect; events occupy a linear past–present–future axis.

• Slavic speakers: narratives foreground completion, duration, and the internal temporal profile of events.

• Japanese speakers: narratives integrate habituality, ongoingness, and potentiality; temporality is multi-dimensional.

• Pirahã/Yucatec Maya speakers: narratives foreground relational and contextual timing, not abstract sequencing.

• Amharic speakers: narratives emphasise cyclic or recurring patterns; events are part of structured temporal phases.

Cognition: Temporal construal shapes prediction, memory, planning, and narrative rhythm, tuning speakers to the patterns their language makes salient.

---

6. Concluding reflection

Typology reveals that temporality is not an external metric but an enacted horizon.

Languages cut time differently, producing:

• Linear, agent-focused temporal worlds

• Aspectually structured event-centric worlds

• Multi-dimensional habitual/potential worlds

• Relational and context-dependent temporal worlds

• Cyclical or phase-patterned worlds

These patterns shape not only what is experienced, but how experience itself is organised. 

Typological Construal Strategies: 4 Agency and Causation Across Languages

Processes unfold, participants exist, and space situates them. But how change occurs — who acts, who influences, and how responsibility is distributed — is patterned differently across languages. Relational ontology reminds us: causation is not “out there” to be labelled; it is cut into experience by construal.

---

1. Ergativity vs. accusativity

• Dyirbal and Basque: ergative systems highlight the participant undergoing change over the agent.

  • Agency is backgrounded, especially when the action is intransitive or relational.

  • Syntax enforces a perspective where the event or its patient is central.

• English: accusative system foregrounds the agent; causality is linear, and the “doer” is default.

Typological insight: Languages differ in whether force and responsibility are anchored in the agent or in the event itself.

---

2. Causative strategies

• Turkish: morphological causatives embed control or intentional influence in the verb.

  • Su kaynadı (“the water boiled”) vs. Su kaynattı (“someone caused the water to boil”).

• Japanese: analytic causatives often mark indirect influence: Tarō-ga Hanako-ni benkyō-saseru (“Tarō makes Hanako study”), foregrounding relational mediation.

Typological insight: Morphological vs. analytic causatives pattern how agency is distributed, direct or indirect, in relation to the process.

---

3. Evidentiality and agency modulation

• Tibetan and Quechua integrate evidential markers with agency.

  • The speaker signals whether the causal chain is observed, inferred, or reported.

  • Responsibility and perception are relationally encoded.

Typological insight: Agency and causation are epistemically constrained; language marks not just who acts, but how the speaker accesses and interprets the action.

---

4. Cross-linguistic comparison: key contrasts

Feature	English	Dyirbal/Basque	Turkish	Japanese	Tibetan/Quechua
Agent prominence	High	Low	Medium	Medium	Relational/epistemic
Causative encoding	Analytic	Minimal	Morphological	Analytic	Morphosyntactic + evidential
Event-centred vs agent-centred	Agent-centred	Event-centred	Mixed	Mixed	Event & epistemic focus
Responsibility foregrounded	Explicit	Implicit	Explicit/relational	Relational	Medially encoded

---

5. Cognitive and narrative consequences

• English speakers: narratives emphasise doers, villains, heroes, and linear causal chains.

• Dyirbal/Basque speakers: narratives highlight events and their relational consequences; agents may be backgrounded.

• Turkish/Japanese speakers: narratives modulate intentionality and influence, foregrounding degrees of control.

• Tibetan/Quechua speakers: narratives integrate epistemic stance and evidential access, creating multi-layered causal worlds.

Cognition: The habitual construal of agency shapes attention, attribution, moral reasoning, and narrative expectation.

---

6. Concluding reflection

Typology demonstrates that agency is a patterned potential, not a universal constant.

Languages cut causation differently, creating:

• Agent-centred worlds

• Event-centred worlds

• Relationally distributed worlds

• Epistemically mediated worlds

These patterns shape not just what events occur, but how they can be experienced, interpreted, and narrated.

Typological Construal Strategies: 3 Spatial Construal Across Languages

Processes and participants establish what happens and who or what exists, but where phenomena are located is equally foundational. Spatial construal is not a neutral map of coordinates; it is the horizon within which experience occurs. Typological contrasts reveal the diverse ontologies languages actualise for space and perspective.

---

1. Egocentric vs. geocentric frames of reference

• English: predominantly egocentric — spatial relations are expressed relative to the speaker or deictic center: left, behind, in front.

• Guugu Yimithirr (Australian Aboriginal language): strictly geocentric — all spatial expressions use cardinal directions (north, south, east, west).

• Tzeltal (Mayan): combines geocentric with topological orientation, marking uphill/downhill, facing orientation, and trajectory.

Typological insight: Geocentric languages externalise the horizon, decentring the speaker and embedding the participant in a relationally patterned landscape.

---

2. Perceptual and accessibility distinctions

• Japanese and Korean encode visibility and attention in spatial terms:

  • Distinctions between visible vs. non-visible objects.

  • Demonstratives reflect not only distance but perceptual salience.

Typological insight: Space is not only physical but epistemically relational; spatial construal patterns what is accessible to perception and attention.

---

3. Spatial granularity and event integration

• ASL: uses the signing space to integrate spatial relations, movement, and processes simultaneously.

  • Location encodes agent, object, and action vectors.

  • Events unfold in space as part of the narrative’s gestalt.

Typological insight: In embodied languages, space itself is a relational medium, merging participant, process, and horizon.

---

4. Cross-linguistic comparison: key contrasts

Feature	English	Guugu Yimithirr	Tzeltal	ASL
Default frame of reference	Egocentric	Geocentric	Mixed	Embodied/spatial
Relation to speaker	Centred	Decentred	Decentred	Co-actualised
Perceptual salience marking	Minimal	None	Topology-based	Integrated in space
Event integration in space	Low	Moderate	Moderate	High
Horizon construal	Self-based	Environmental	Environmental	Spatial-gestural

---

5. Cognitive and narrative consequences

• English speakers: narratives are anchored to the narrator’s point of view; spatial shifts are relative to self.

• Guugu Yimithirr speakers: narratives embed participants in an absolute, geocentric landscape, often producing spatially continuous storytelling.

• Tzeltal speakers: narratives combine geocentric positioning with event topology, foregrounding environmental relationality.

• ASL users: narratives spatially co-actualise participants and processes, creating multi-dimensional, embodied story worlds.

Cognition: Habitual spatial construal affects navigation, attention, memory, and relational reasoning; the language defines how horizons of experience are structured.

---

6. Concluding reflection

Typology shows that spatial construal is a relational and perspectival cut, not a representation of fixed coordinates. Languages pattern:

• Where phenomena can appear,

• How they relate to each other,

• How they are perceptually and socially accessible,

• How events and participants can be co-located.

These patterns shape experience, narrative, and cognition. Together with process and participant construal, spatial construal demonstrates that language structures not just what can happen or who can act, but where it can unfold.

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.

---

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 behaviour, 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.

---

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.

---

3. Classificatory systems: Bantu noun classes

Bantu languages categorise 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 pluralisation.

• 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.

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

5. Cognitive and narrative consequences

• English speakers: narratives emphasise 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.

---

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.

Languages as Ontologies II: Meta-Conclusion: Construal as the Architecture of Possibility

Across this series, we have moved deliberately: from processes to participants, from space to causation, from temporality to the internal–external cut. Each domain revealed how languages do not represent a pre-existing world but pattern the horizon of what can become a phenomenon.

This final post consolidates the architecture we have built.

---

1. The Six Cuts as a System

Each domain is a different kind of ontological cut — a way of partitioning the potential of experience into intelligible phenomena.

• Process construal patterns how becoming unfolds.

• Participant construal patterns what may count as a being.

• Spatial construal patterns where phenomena can be located.

• Agency and causation construal patterns how force and influence flow.

• Temporal construal patterns how unfolding is rendered meaningful.

• Internal/external construal patterns what counts as access, evidence, and experience itself.

None of these construals describe reality.

They actualise different possible realities — different ways of cutting the continuum of experience into phenomena, relations, and horizons.

In relational ontology, this is the central point:

construal is world-making, not world-mapping.

---

2. Construal is systemic, not additive

These six domains are not separate “features” of language.

They mutually condition each other.

A language with geocentric spatial anchoring tends also to pattern agency relationally.

A language with aspect-first temporality often foregrounds event structure over agentive control.

A language with strong evidentiality tends to reshape the internal/external cut itself.

Each system is a coherent orientation toward experience, a patterned potential.

Thus the ontology expressed by a language is not produced by single categories but by the whole configuration of construal strategies.

Languages are not bundles of features.

They are co-individuated systems of experience.

---

3. What typology becomes under relational ontology

Traditional typology asks:

How do languages encode X?

Which assumes there is a single X “out there” being encoded.

Our series reframes the question:

How do languages constitute X as a phenomenon at all?

Different languages do not “encode” different versions of time, space, agency, or entities.

They enact different cuts that make different kinds of time, space, agency, and entities possible.

Typology thus becomes the comparative study of:

how languages actualise different ontological potentials.

This is not relativism — because all cuts are perspectival on the same underlying potential —

nor universalism — because no cut is privileged or foundational.

It is systemic perspectivism grounded in relational ontology.

---

4. The narrative payoff: worlds made possible

Because language patterns construal, it patterns narrative.

Different languages open different narrative universes:

• Event-centred worlds

• Agent-centred worlds

• Geocentric worlds

• Cyclic worlds

• Worlds where emotion is distributed

• Worlds where evidence is structural

• Worlds where being is stable

• Worlds where being is emergent

These are not stylistic accents; they are ontological dramaturgies built into the meaning potential of each language.

A language shapes not merely how stories are told but what can be storied.

---

5. Where this series leaves us

We end with a new sense of what linguistic diversity is:

not variation in coding, but variation in ontological patterning.

Every language:

• construes a different grammar of becoming,

• enacts a different architecture of experience,

• opens a different horizon of meaningfulness.

Languages differ not in what they “say,” but in the worlds they make inhabitable.

This is the core thesis the series has established.

Languages as Ontologies II: 6 Construal of Internal vs. External Phenomena

In many philosophical traditions, experience is divided cleanly into “inner” and “outer” domains: thoughts here, world out there.

Relational ontology rejects that dichotomy. There is no pre-given “inner world” waiting to be expressed, nor an “external world” waiting to be represented. There are only cuts in experience — perspectival partitions enacted through construal.

Languages make these cuts differently. They pattern how experience becomes knowable, how evidence is tracked, how perception is distinguished from inference. This domain is crucial because it shows most clearly that languages are not representational devices; they are theories of access to phenomena.

---

1. How experience is cut

Languages vary dramatically in how they distinguish firsthand experience, report, inference, and internal states:

• Evidentiality systems (Tibetan, Quechua, Turkish)
  These languages grammaticise whether the speaker saw the event, heard it, inferred it, or was told about it.
  The source of construal becomes part of the event structure itself.
  “It rained” is not complete without specifying how the rain became a phenomenon for the speaker.

• Internal vs. external mental events (Japanese, Korean)
  These languages often encode mental and emotional experience as relationally distributed, not internal possessions.
  Feelings “come over” or “happen to” a participant; they are emergent relational states, not interior substances.

• Accessibility and experiential reach (Dyirbal, Kalaallisut)
  Some languages distinguish visible vs. non-visible, proximal vs. distal, witnessed vs. unreachable phenomena.
  Knowledge is patterned as situated access, not as neutral representation.

• Inferential vs. experiential constructions (Classical Chinese, Newar)
  Certain languages foreground inference, making explicit whether a phenomenon is construed from signs rather than directly perceived.
  The language treats inference as a mode of experiencing, not a second-class substitute.

---

2. Construal of evidence as ontology

These linguistic systems enact distinct ontological stances toward the relation between experiencer and phenomenon:

• Perceptually anchored ontologies
  A world where phenomena “count” only insofar as one has direct perceptual access (Tibetan, Quechua).
  Existence is contact-dependent: the phenomenon is defined through its experiential pathway.

• Relationally emergent ontologies
  Mental states do not live “inside” individuals but arise through interactions, situations, and affective fields (Japanese, Korean).
  The cut between “inner” and “outer” softens into situated emergence.

• Distributed access ontologies
  Some languages allocate epistemic rights and evidential access across participants or social roles, making knowledge a socially patterned phenomenon rather than an individual one.

None of these systems “encode reality”; each patterns what it is possible to regard as known, felt, or experienced.

---

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling:
  Languages with rich evidential marking produce narratives that foreground perspective, source, and legitimacy of knowledge.
  Narrators in Japanese may downplay interiority, producing stories where emotion arises from context and relation rather than introspective declaration.
  Inference-heavy languages create narratives that hinge on clues, signs, and the co-arising of meaning.

• Cognition:
  Speakers learn to anticipate whether a phenomenon must be witnessed, inferred, or socially validated.
  They track access as part of the experience itself.
  This shapes how memory is structured, how testimony is trusted, and how emotion is understood.

---

4. Closing reflection

This final domain shows the deepest point of the series:

Languages are not representational systems mapping a pre-made world.

They are ontological operators — patterned resources for carving experience into phenomena, relations, and perspectives.

Across these six domains — process, participant, space, agency, temporality, and experiential access — we see that each language enacts a distinct local ontology of the possible.

Languages differ not in what they “say about the world,” but in the worlds they make inhabitable.

Every construal is a relational cut; every cut is an opening into a lived reality.

Languages as Ontologies II: 5 Construal of Time and Temporality

Processes unfold, participants exist, space situates them, and causality governs their interactions. But how events are ordered, patterned, and experienced in time is another domain where languages enact profoundly different ontologies. Relational ontology reminds us: languages do not simply “mark clock time”; they pattern the experience of becoming itself.

1. How unfolding is patterned

Languages vary in how they construe temporality:

• Tenseless languages vs. heavily tensed systems: Some languages, such as Yucatec Maya or Pirahã, do not obligatorily encode tense. Temporal relations are inferred from context, aspect, or evidential markers, foregrounding the relational and emergent nature of events. In contrast, English and Romance languages grammaticise past, present, and future, giving time a linear, segmentable structure.

• Aspect-first languages vs. event-structure-first languages: In Slavic languages, aspect (completed vs. ongoing) dominates, shaping how the event’s internal unfolding is perceived. Aspect is not optional; it structures how participants experience the event’s temporal profile.

• Cyclic, spatial, or phase-based temporal systems: Some African and Oceanic languages encode time as spatial, circular, or experiential cycles, such as Amharic, where temporal relations often reference habitual or cyclical patterns rather than linear sequencing.

The key insight: what counts as “before,” “after,” or “during” is patterned by linguistic possibility, not universally given.

2. Temporality construal as ontology

Through these systems, languages enact different default ontologies of becoming:

• Linear, segmentable time (English, French) — events are sequential, with explicit markers; unfolding is predictable and narratively structurable.

• Aspectual or phase-oriented time (Slavic, Japanese) — the quality of the event’s internal structure matters more than its chronological location.

• Relational or cyclic time (Pirahã, Amharic) — temporal experience is contextual, emergent, and tied to patterns of recurrence rather than discrete points.

This demonstrates that temporality is not an external metric, but a relational field within which processes, participants, and causality are actualised.

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling: Linear-time languages favor plot-driven narratives with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Aspect-focused or cyclic-time languages foreground processes, repetition, and relational patterns, creating narratives that feel emergent, reflective, or cyclical.

• Cognition: Habitual temporal construal affects prediction, memory, and planning. Speakers internalise not just sequences, but the rhythm and salience of events, their completion, and their relational positioning.

4. Closing reflection

Temporal construal is a cut into experience itself. Languages pattern how becoming can be perceived, remembered, and narrated, shaping both thought and story. Time is not a universal backdrop; it is enacted through language, a medium through which events, agents, and relations are made intelligible.

Languages as Ontologies II: 4 Construal of Agency and Causation

Processes unfold and participants exist, but how events happen — who acts, who influences, and how change occurs — is patterned differently across languages. Relational ontology asks: languages do not merely “mark who did what”; they pattern the distribution of force, responsibility, and potentiality.

1. How events unfold

Languages encode causation and agency in diverse, revealing ways:

• Ergativity vs. accusativity: Languages like Dyirbal or Basque mark agents and patients differently, creating a construal where agency is not the default; focus falls on the participant experiencing change. In contrast, English foregrounds the agent, creating a default of active causation.

• Causative morphology vs. analytic causation: In Turkish, causative affixes can transform a verb to signal intentional influence (“The chef boiled the water” vs. “The chef made the water boil”), embedding degrees of control and participation directly into the verb.

• Grammaticalised control, intention, and evidentiality: Languages like Tibetan integrate evidential markers with agency, signaling whether an event is observed, inferred, or reported — a subtle ontological statement about the speaker’s relation to the causal chain.

• Downplayed vs. foregrounded agency: Some languages, such as Japanese, often leave the agent implicit, shifting focus to the event itself or the relational network in which it occurs.

2. Agency construal as ontology

By examining how languages encode causation, we see contrasting ontological defaults:

• Agent-centred (English, many Indo-European languages) — the world unfolds around doers and their intentionality.

• Event-centred (Dyirbal, Salishan) — processes are primary; agents are sometimes peripheral or backgrounded.

• Relationally distributed (Tibetan, Japanese) — causality is mediated across participants, evidential access, and situational salience.

Language here does not “represent” causation neutrally; it structures how force, change, and responsibility are perceptible and narratable.

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling: Agent-focused languages favor heroes, villains, and deliberate action; event-focused or relationally distributed languages foreground unfolding situations, context, and emergent consequences.

• Cognition: Speakers learn to track causal chains differently — predicting, attributing, and experiencing agency in ways that align with their language’s patterns. These patterns shape moral reasoning, narrative expectation, and attention to force.

4. Closing reflection

Languages carve causality and agency in distinct ways. They are ontological instruments, not mirrors: each construal makes certain relationships salient while backgrounding others. The distribution of force, intentionality, and consequence is as much a product of linguistic patterning as of the “world itself.”

With processes, participants, spatial positioning, and agency outlined, we are now poised to explore time and temporality — how languages pattern unfolding not just in space and causation, but in becoming itself.

Languages as Ontologies II: 3 Construal of Space and Perspective

If processes shape becoming and participants shape being, spatial construal shapes position and relation — how phenomena are anchored, located, and made intelligible in experience. Again, languages do not “map physical space”; they pattern the horizon within which phenomena may be situated.

1. How experience is anchored

Languages differ in how they allow speakers to locate themselves and others, both physically and cognitively:

• Egocentric vs. geocentric frames: English and most European languages default to egocentric coordinates: “left,” “behind,” “in front.” In contrast, Guugu Yimithirr (an Australian Aboriginal language) requires geocentric reference: cardinal directions (“north,” “south”) govern all spatial description. The world is not merely “relative to me”; it is always anchored in the environment itself.

• Directional and topological richness: Some languages, like Tzeltal (Mayan), grammaticise uphill/downhill and uphill-facing orientation, encoding not just position but preferred movement vectors. Spatial construal is inseparable from processual flow.

• Visibility and accessibility: In Japanese, distinctions such as in/view verbs or the use of demonstratives encode not only position but perceptual and social accessibility — whether a phenomenon is directly observable, known, or socially salient.

The key insight: spatial language is a lens on how phenomena enter into the speaker’s horizon, not a “translation” of metric coordinates.

2. Spatial construal as ontology

Through these systems, languages enact a default ontology of location and perspective:

• Egocentric orientation (English, French) — the speaker is the primary anchor; space is relational but centred on the self.

• Geocentric orientation (Guugu Yimithirr, Tzeltal) — phenomena are located in a landscape of intrinsic coordinates; relationality is ecological, not self-centred.

• Perceptual and social anchoring (Japanese, Korean) — entities exist within the horizon of attention, visibility, or social relevance, foregrounding relational access over absolute placement.

This demonstrates that what counts as “here” or “there” is patterned by language, not given in a universal space.

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling: An egocentric language produces narratives anchored to the narrator’s journey and perspective; a geocentric language produces stories that unfold across the landscape itself, often emphasizing continuity and environmental interaction.

• Cognition: Spatial reasoning, memory, and planning are shaped by habitual construal: how one encodes directions, relations, and relative salience is mediated by the patterns the language offers.

4. Closing reflection

Languages do not merely “label locations.” They construct the horizon within which experience occurs, determining what can be salient, accessible, or relationally foregrounded. Spatial construal is an ontological cut: it structures not only perception but the lived, narratable world.

With processes, participants, and spatial construal in place, we now have a rich foundation for exploring agency, causation, and temporality, completing the core triad of experience in relational ontology.

Languages as Ontologies II: 2 Construal of Participants

If processes are the grammar of becoming, participants are the grammar of being. But again, relational ontology asks us to suspend the naïve assumption that entities exist as fixed “things” independent of our construal. Languages do not label objects; they pattern what it is possible to treat as a participant in experience.

1. What counts as an entity?

Languages vary dramatically in what they allow, require, or foreground as participants:

• Animacy hierarchies: In many Australian Aboriginal languages, grammatical marking distinguishes entities by relative animacy. Humans, animals, plants, and inanimates occupy different slots in the syntax — constraining how participants can act, be acted upon, or co-occur.

• Fluidity of noun–verb distinction: Yucatec Maya allows the same root to appear as a noun or a verb depending on context. “The tree” and “treeing” are not separate conceptual domains; they are perspectival cuts on the same phenomenon, highlighting relational flexibility rather than ontological fixity.

• Classificatory systems: Bantu noun class systems do not merely categorise; they pattern the participant’s role, agency, and relation to other entities. A “liquid” noun class signals relational affordances in ways that reshape how events and participants interlock.

• Definiteness, possession, number: In languages like Pirahã, number is optional and possession is encoded pragmatically rather than grammatically. A participant may exist as a relationally situated node, not as a discrete, countable object.

2. Participant construal as ontology

By observing participant marking and classificatory strategies, we see each language enact a default stance toward being:

• Stable entities (English, many Indo-European languages) — participants are discrete, countable, and manipulable; relationality is secondary.

• Emergent participants (Pirahã, some Mayan languages) — entities come into view through interaction; their “existence” is contingent on context and relational salience.

• Relational nodes (Bantu noun-class languages, Dyirbal) — participants are defined primarily by networked roles and interactions, rather than intrinsic properties.

These patterns shape how speakers experience causality, responsibility, and even empathy — all grounded in the way their language allows participants to exist and interact.

3. Implications for narrative and cognition

• Storytelling: A language that foregrounds stable participants creates narratives of possession, inheritance, and individual agency. A language treating participants as emergent fosters narratives of situational flux, co-arising roles, and relational contingency.

• Cognition: The habitual construal of entities shapes attention, memory, and prediction. Speakers learn to track what counts as a participant, who may act, and which relationships are central. This is not deterministic but pattern-shaping.

4. Closing reflection

Every language cuts reality along different axes of being. Construal of participants is not about mapping “objects” onto words but about making experience legible: defining what can be counted, related, possessed, or acted upon.

Together with process construal, this shows how languages pattern both action and being — the two pillars of lived experience. The next posts will explore space, agency, and temporality, revealing even more ways in which languages enable different worlds to be inhabited and narrated.