Introduction
This companion series to When Grammar Pretends to Be God deepens the critique by turning to ontology itself. It asks how grammar — specifically the grammar of the clause — has shaped not just what we say about the world, but what we believe the world is. Drawing on a relational ontology informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we explore how grammar enacts a world of relations — and how Western metaphysics forgets this enactment, reifying those relations into things. God, force, consciousness — these are not pre-existing entities that language names, but interpretive relations that language actualises. When grammar forgets its own semiotic architecture, it performs a sleight of hand: a god trick. This series aims to expose that trick — and offer another way of thinking.
1 Relations, Reified
Western metaphysics has long mistaken its own language for the world.
The clause — that smallest unit of meaning which binds a Subject to a Process and a Complement — is not a mirror of reality. It is a semiotic act: a way of making meaning through relation. And meaning is how reality comes into being. The clause does not depict a world already there; it enacts a relation, and in doing so, actualises a world.
Yet across theologies and sciences alike, this grammatical architecture has been misread as ontology. Relations encoded by grammar have been mistaken for things that exist.
In Christian theology, the Subject becomes God-as-agent, the Process becomes divine action ("created," "redeemed"), and the Complement becomes the world — a patient, acted upon. But these roles are not ontological categories. They are functional meanings in a clause, projected into metaphysical space. The clause gives us not just God's Word, but God's grammar.
Science, too, inherits this scaffolding. Forces act. Energy flows. Laws govern. But what is "energy" apart from our need to assign agency in a transitive clause? What is a "law" but an interpersonal projection of obligation onto the cosmos? Even the Big Bang, the ultimate Process in cosmological grammar, is framed as if it had a Subject, a cause, and a trajectory.
Our relational ontology offers a different reading.
Instead of reifying Subject, Process, and Complement as existing entities, we read them as semantic functions — relational positions within a meaning instance. These roles do not reflect the architecture of the world. They enact a relation within the architecture of meaning.
And meaning is not a thing among things. It is potential — the structured readiness of a system to be actualised in relation. And when it is actualised, that is reality: not something described, but something enacted between speakers, strata, and systems.
This series will lay bare how Western thought has mistaken the architecture of language for the architecture of being. It will show that God, like gravity, may not be a substance at all — but a clause misunderstood.
The Word was not made flesh. The clause was made God.
And it's time we read it differently.
2 The Clause as the Lie That Tells the Truth
The clause is a marvellous fiction.
It construes a world of doing, sensing, being — a world in which agents act, things happen, events unfold. But this is not because the world is like that. It is because our grammar makes it like that. The clause tells a story of reality by fabricating relations between functions: Subject, Process, Complement. It is not the world's camera — it is its stage.
And what appears on this stage?
In transitivity, every clause is a little drama. A Process (e.g. creates, destroys, understands) is a happening or doing. It is relational, a semantic phase between participants. But Western metaphysics reinterprets these relational roles as entities: the Actor becomes an agent (e.g. "God"), the Goal becomes a patient (e.g. "the world"), and the Process becomes a force or power — as if these were parts of being rather than roles in meaning.
This is what our relational ontology seeks to reverse.
The Subject is not an entity, but a semantic function — an interpersonal role in the exchange of meaning. The Process is not a force, but an experiential relation. The Complement is not a substance, but another interpersonal role. These do not exist in the world before language. They exist in language as our way of construing the world — and in doing so, they actualise a world of kinds: agents, forces, causes, selves.
It is only when these relational functions are reified — frozen into ontological status — that grammar becomes metaphysics. We forget that "God created the heavens and the earth" is not a description but a construal — a construal with history, ideology, and theology woven into every function.
Our ontology reintroduces meaning as relational potential, not as categorical presence. In this model:
The clause is an instance of meaning — and meaning is how reality becomes actual.
The world construed by grammar is semiotic — and that is what being means.
Grammar enacts relation; it does not discover substance.
The so-called "lie" of the clause — that there are Subjects and Complements in the world — is also its truth. For by telling this lie, we do make meaning. We enact a shared world. But to believe that world precedes the meaning that brings it forth — to treat the clause as a report, not a relation — is to mistake enacted actuality for independent substance.
The clause is not fiction. It is formation.
3 Reification and the Ontology of the Frozen Relation
Grammar is not innocent. It does not simply name what is there — it brings it into being, and then forgets that it did so. This forgetting is what we call reification.
A relational function — like "Subject" or "Process" — becomes a thing, a substance, an entity. The clause enacts a semantic relation, but we read it as if it refers to a metaphysical reality. In this sleight of hand, grammar pretends to be God.
Let's take a familiar example:
Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.
This clause enacts a relational Process ("is") linking two Participants — one Token ("consciousness"), one Value ("an emergent property of the brain"). In SFL terms, this is an identifying relational clause: it construes one meaning as being equivalent to another. But when read ontologically, it makes a much stronger claim — that "consciousness" is, as if it exists independently, out there, waiting to be found.
What our relational ontology reveals is this:
This clause doesn’t uncover a truth — it instantiates a relation. It’s not mapping the world; it’s making meaning. It is semiotic, not metaphysical. And once we see that, the implications are profound.
God exists is not a statement of ontology, but an identifying relation: it actualises a potential relation between a Subject and a Process.
The mind causes action is not the discovery of a causal agent, but the instantiation of a transitive clause structure: Actor – Process – Goal.
Time moves forward is not a metaphysical law, but a projection of temporal Process onto an abstract Participant.
Each is a clause. Each enacts a construal. And each has been reified — taken as a representation of what is. But when we treat these semiotic enactments as ontological realities, we confuse grammar for being.
The antidote is not to discard grammar, but to see it for what it is: a powerful engine of relational construal — not a mirror of a world, but a world-making tool. In this view, meaning does not refer to pre-given entities. It brings forth relational actualities. And metaphysics is the forgetting that we did this ourselves.
4 The Metaphysics of the Clause — And How to Undo It
When grammar pretends to be God, it pretends not just to mean but to be. It takes the fleeting, contingent nature of semiotic choice — and freezes it into ontology.
What enables this sleight of hand?
The clause.
In SFL, the clause is a figure — a quantum of meaning that construes experience in terms of processes and participants. It does not represent an objective world. It offers one way of construing meaning from potential: a snapshot of what is being meant now.
But from a Western metaphysical stance, the clause gets misread as a report of reality. It shifts from being an act of meaning to a statement of fact. From semiotic construal to metaphysical claim.
This happens most insidiously in relational clauses:
God is love.
Force is mass times acceleration.
Reality is language.
Each of these is structurally an identifying clause. Each equates two participant roles. And each, in philosophical hands, has been taken as a metaphysical truth.
But a relational ontology — informed by SFL — sees it differently:
These clauses instantiate meaning; they don’t discover it.
The copula is enacts a relation; it does not reveal a hidden essence.
The clause realises a semiotic relation, not an ontological identity.
This does not mean that such clauses are wrong. It means they are doing something different than metaphysics has assumed. They are not unveiling what exists. They are construing what means — in a particular context, through a particular semiotic system.
So what does it mean to undo the metaphysics of the clause?
It means returning to the clause as meaning in motion — not frozen truth. It means understanding that "God," "mind," "self," "reality" are not entities — but the names we give to dense knots of meaning, realised in semiotic relation. It means seeing that every clause is a move in meaning-making — not a mirror held up to the world. And it means recognising:
Grammar does not reflect being.
It enacts relation.
Only when we forget this, does grammar pretend to be God.
Epilogue: The World We Make With Grammar
We began with a provocation: that grammar pretends to be God. That, beneath the surface of metaphysical systems and ontological claims, lies a sleight of hand — a forgetting of how meaning is made.
Each part of this series has traced a path through that forgetting:
We saw how relational processes give rise to the illusion of substances — as if meaning were found, not made.
We examined how identities are not innate but enacted — instantiated in semiotic relation.
We uncovered how reification freezes relations into things — making thought look like the world.
And we reclaimed the clause itself as a unit of meaning, not of metaphysical fact.
At the heart of it all is a simple shift in perspective:
From things that exist to relations that are made.
From ontology as essence to ontology as instantiation.
From substance to actualisation.
This is not a retreat from reality — it is a shift in how we understand reality itself. For reality is not what lies behind meaning, but what comes into being through it.
What we call “the world” is not out there, waiting to be named. It is continually brought forth — actualised as meaning — through the dynamic interplay of systems in relation. Reality is not discovered; it is enacted. Not named, but made meaningful — again and again.
Grammar is not divine. But it is generative. It does not mirror the world. It makes worlds — worlds of meaning, of value, of relation.
When grammar pretends to be God, it forgets this. But when grammar is reclaimed as our own — as the architecture of meaning — we remember:
We are not prisoners of language. We are its participants. And the world it builds is not ours to reflect — it is ours to enact.
For meaning is not about things. Meaning is how things come to be.
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