1 Grammar with Delusions of Grandeur
Western thought is not just haunted by ghosts of metaphysical speculation — it is possessed by the shadow of its own grammar.
The clause — the fundamental unit of meaning in most languages — has long masqueraded as a mirror of the world. Subject, Process, Complement: these grammatical functions are not merely tools for expressing meaning, but have been reified into ontological categories. (Note: In systemic functional linguistics, these elements span multiple metafunctions: the Subject is interpersonal, the Process experiential, and the Complement interpersonal. The simplified triad here reflects the common metaphysical misreading of grammar as a direct map to reality, not the nuanced functional grammar model.) The Subject becomes an agent, the Process becomes action, and the Complement becomes a recipient or patient of that action. Meaning turns into metaphysics. Syntax, into substance.
From this projection, an entire theology and science are born. God, in Christian theology, is not merely a symbol of potentiality or totality — he is rendered as the Subject par excellence, the transcendent originator who acts. In the beginning, God created... The syntax is not incidental. It installs agency and transitivity at the heart of the cosmos. The clause doesn’t just describe God — it makes God in its own grammatical image.
Likewise, modern science, despite its claims to objectivity, inherits the same semantic scaffold. Forces act. Particles move. Laws govern. The universe is not merely construed — it is narrated in clauses that re-enact the same trinity of subjecthood, process, and object. And we believe it, because our grammar compels it.
But what if none of this is ontologically necessary? What if these ‘actions’ are interpretive, not intrinsic — the result of semantic architecture rather than metaphysical truth? What if being is not inherently transitive?
This series will set out to expose the illusion. Not to deny the value of theological or scientific discourse, but to reveal their hidden architecture: the deep grammar that underwrites centuries of metaphysical thought. For in the beginning was not the Word — but the clause.
And the clause has much to answer for.
2 “In the Beginning”: The Clause as Creation Myth
The Book of Genesis does not begin with a concept. It begins with a clause.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
This is not a neutral description of divine action — it is a canonical enactment of transitive syntax. The Subject ("God") acts through a Process ("created") upon a Complement ("the heavens and the earth"). The structure is archetypal. It is not merely what God does; it is how we make sense of doing — and by implication, of being.
But here’s the problem: this clause is not a window onto reality. It is a projection of a linguistic system. And in projecting it, we mistake grammar for cosmology.
The Grammatical God
God becomes the ultimate Subject — absolute, agentive, initiating. The verb "create" grants Him total transitivity: nothing is co-constructed, nothing evolves, nothing emerges — it is simply done unto. The Complement (heaven and earth) has no agency, no potential of its own. The metaphysics is built into the syntax.
And so theology inherits its metaphysical scaffolding from the architecture of language. “I AM” becomes the divine name, rooted in the copula — the verb of being. But what does it mean to predicate being through a copular clause? What is assumed when existence itself is construed in subject–predicate form?
God is not the mystery of meaning; he becomes the grammatical necessity of clause structure.
Theology as Clause-Projection
When the New Testament proclaims, “In the beginning was the Word”, it reiterates this metaphysical commitment. Logos becomes divine not only in concept but in structure — not just Word as reason, but Word as clause, and clause as the ordering principle of the cosmos. And thus:
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God is Subject.
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Logos is Process.
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Creation is Complement.
This is not Trinitarian theology; this is trinitarian syntax.
What follows is a reification of clause roles into ontological roles. Father (Subject), Son (Process), Spirit (Complement or Circumstance?) — metaphysics begins to orbit the gravitational centre of grammar. We are not so much interpreting the divine as re-enacting the clause on a cosmic scale.
The Ontological Consequences
The consequences are profound:
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Being becomes equated with clause-level Subjecthood.
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Action becomes the privileged mode of reality.
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Creation is construed as a one-way process, not a dialogue.
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The world is rendered passive — said, done, willed into being.
But what if the clause is not a mirror of creation, but a mechanism of construal? What if meaning is dialogic, not transitive? What if God's 'being' is not agentive, but semiotic — the unfolding of meaning potential within a system of interaction?
In other words: what if Genesis is not a report, but a semantic performance?
3 From Let There Be Light to Newton’s Laws — Clause Structure Goes Scientific
Once grammar had carved its niche in theology, it did not retire. It mutated. Enlightenment rationality simply stripped off the robes of religion and redressed the same clause structure in the language of natural law.
Force moves bodies.Energy transfers through systems.The universe expands.
Each of these is a clause, not a fact. A Subject initiates, a Process unfolds, and a Complement is acted upon. In science, just as in theology, the metaphysics is silently scaffolded by the syntactic.
Science as Secularised Syntax
Let us be clear: Newton did not discover transitivity. He inherited it — from Latin, from logic, from the scholastic worldview where action must have an agent. The laws of motion read like transitive clauses because that’s what they are: God has exited stage left, but the syntax remains intact.
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Subject: force, energy, gravity, evolution
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Process: moves, pulls, adapts, causes
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Complement: matter, organisms, spacetime
The syntax of agency is never questioned. “Gravity pulls”, as if gravity were an old man with a rope. “Natural selection favours”, as if it held a clipboard. These are not metaphors used by poets — they are metaphors embedded in scientific logic, metaphors turned into ontology through repeated grammatical performance.
The Persistence of the Transitive Fantasy
Even in contemporary physics, the clause structure clings on. We say:
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A particle interacts with a field.
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The Higgs boson gives mass to other particles.
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The universe obeys mathematical laws.
But pause. What kind of thing is a law, that it can be obeyed? Who enacts it? Is the particle a Subject, or are we simply projecting semantic roles onto mathematical formalisms?
The semiotic reality: these expressions are meanings, not mirrors. The clause does not report a reality; it enacts a construal. And that construal is shaped by the logics of grammar, not the structures of the cosmos.
Grammar as Invisible Epistemology
We may speak of “forces acting on bodies” or “information being transmitted”, but these are syntactic metaphors, not empirical observations. No one has ever seen “a force” do anything. It is not the presence of evidence, but the pressure of grammar, that demands such formulations.
We must ask: Why do our scientific theories look like transitive clauses? Why must every phenomenon be rephrased as Subject–Verb–Object?
Because we’re not merely observing the world. We are grammatically rebuilding it.
4 Cogito Grammaticus — The Clause Rewrites the Self
Having traced the clause from theology to science, we arrive at its final masquerade: the grammar of selfhood. No longer divine, no longer empirical — now the clause becomes introspective. It turns inward, slips behind the eyes, and declares its most famous tautology:
I think, therefore I am.
Descartes’ formula is not just a philosophical proposition. It is a clause. Subject + Process. I (Subject) think (Process), therefore I am (another clause, copular this time: Subject + Relational Process + Attribute). His metaphysics is a syntactic artefact.
What Descartes discovered was not the indubitable foundation of being, but the grammatical illusion of agency. The clause enacts a Subject that thinks, and then grants that Subject ontological status. I do, therefore I am. The clause makes it so.
The Grammar of Consciousness
Our everyday experience is no less enchanted:
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I see a bird.
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I feel tired.
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I know the answer.
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I am sad.
In each case, grammar assigns a first-person Subject — I — and grants it power over a Process (see, feel, know, be). But are these really discrete events happening to a stable entity? Or is the “I” simply a grammatical placeholder for coherence?
The self, then, is not the source of meaning but its grammatical projection. The repeated instantiation of Subject–Process constructions gives the illusion of a persistent entity beneath experience.
Grammar as Ontological Prosthesis
Even the idea of agency depends on transitivity. “I made a decision.” But what is a decision? Is it an act or a state? Is it observable or merely declared? It doesn’t matter. Grammar renders it real. Once it enters the clause, it exists.
And when we move to inner experience — intention, belief, desire — the syntactic fiction deepens. Grammar doesn’t merely describe the mind; it conjures it.
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I want
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I believe
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I remember
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I hope
These are grammatical acts of possession and process. Without them, the mind would be formless, a soup of impressions. The clause gives it shape. The clause gives it selfhood.
The Linguistic Delusion of the Subject
Western philosophy treats the Subject as a metaphysical starting point. But what if it is a grammatical artefact? What if our entire notion of individuality — of being a unified knower, actor, and feeler — is scaffolded not by neurons or soul, but by the default structures of clause grammar?
The Subject is not the origin of the clause. It is its product.
And so we return to the beginning:
In the beginning was the clause.And the clause was with meaning, and the clause was meaning.And the clause made flesh the Subject, the Process, and the Complement —And lo, metaphysics was born.
Across this series, we've followed the ghostly traces of grammar as it moves through philosophy, theology, science, and selfhood. What began as linguistic organisation — clause, system, stratum, instance — has, over centuries, become mistaken for the structure of reality itself.
The danger is not grammar; it is forgetting that grammar is ours — a semiotic technology for construing experience, not a mirror held up to metaphysical truth. The clause is not the cosmos. The Subject is not the soul. The verb is not creation itself. But when these patterns of meaning lose their status as semiotic constructs, they return as reifications — haunting our disciplines, deifying their categories, ossifying thought.
By retracing this path, we have attempted not just critique but renewal. To show that language is not a veil to be lifted from reality, but the very condition of meaning. Not a system to be mastered, but a terrain we enact with others. Meaning is not inherited; it is instantiated. And in that act of semiotic becoming, the self is forged.
If there is a theology of language, it is this:
In the beginning is not the Word, but the dialogue.
Not the Subject, but the interaction.
Not God as noun, but meaning as process.
Language is not our prison. It is our possibility.
It is not reality that speaks through grammar — it is grammar that speaks reality into being.
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