27 June 2025

The World is Not Made of Things: A Relational Ontology of Meaning

Preface: A New Architecture of Meaning

What if the foundations of our understanding — of self, reality, and knowledge — were built on a hidden assumption? A tacit belief that the world is made up of isolated things, discrete entities locked in place?
This series challenges that assumption by proposing a relational ontology of meaning: a view where meaning is not static or contained but is dynamic, emergent, and fundamentally interwoven with interaction.
From the birth of the self in the semiotic interplay of caregiver and child, to the ghosts of metaphysical grammar haunting theology and science, to the reconstruction of thought itself as a semiotic engine, this collection explores how meaning potential underpins everything we know and are.
Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, semiotics, and contemporary philosophy, we unravel how meaning is enacted and individuated — and how our reality is less a world of things than a web of relations.
Whether you are a student of language, philosophy, cognitive science, or simply a curious mind, these essays invite you to rethink what it means to be.
To read these pages is to embark on a journey where to mean is to be, and to be is to relate.
Welcome to the architecture of meaning — the world remade.

1 Not Substance, but Relation

Western thought has long been preoccupied with things — with substances, entities, and essences. Philosophers have searched for the ultimate building blocks of reality: atoms, ideas, selves, substances, subjects. But what if this entire metaphysical project has been shaped not by insight into the world, but by the form of the language used to describe it?

This piece argues for a relational ontology of meaning: a view in which reality is not made of things with properties, but of meanings enacted through relations. Meaning is not contained in objects or residing in minds; it emerges through patterned interaction — semiotically, socially, and systemically.

In place of a world composed of static entities, we are invited to see a world construed in motion — not because reality itself is reducible to language, but because language is the means by which we make sense of what-is. And the model of language we draw on makes all the difference.

From Substances to Systems

Traditional metaphysics begins with things: God, soul, matter, mind, truth. These are often conceived as self-subsistent entities — each with its own inner nature, existing independently of its relations. This view is so deeply ingrained that it is rarely questioned.

But from a systemic-functional perspective, this starting point is itself a theoretical choice — one heavily shaped by the architecture of the clause. When grammar makes meaning in terms of Subject + Process + Complement, it predisposes us to see the world in terms of agent + action + patient. This, as earlier series have explored, is not an innocent projection. It is an ontological commitment, albeit an unconscious one.

In contrast, a relational ontology begins not with things but with systems of options. In the SFL tradition, the architecture of meaning is not substance-based, but relational:

A system is a set of options — potential ways of meaning.
An instance is a selection from those options.
Meaning arises through relation: between selected features, between strata, between individuals and collectives, between potential and actual.

This model reverses the metaphysical default. It does not treat meaning as carried by forms or stored in minds. It treats meaning as a pattern of relations instantiated through use.

Three Planes of Relation

In place of metaphysical dualisms (e.g. mind vs body, idea vs matter), a relational ontology recognises three interwoven planes of meaning-making:

Stratification – the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction
(semantics realised by lexicogrammar, which is realised by phonology)
Instantiation – the relation between potential and actual
(a system of meaning is instantiated as text, and texts accumulate into system)
Individuation – the relation between collective and personal meaning potential
(the self is not given, but formed through differential access and repeated instantiation)

Each plane is constituted by relation, not by substance. Stratification is not a stack of layers; it is a system of realisation relationships. Instantiation is not a sequence of outputs; it is a dynamic of probabilistic actualisation. Individuation is not the revelation of a pre-existing inner essence; it is the ongoing shaping of a personal semiotic profile through patterned participation in collective meaning.

These planes are not metaphorical. They constitute a semiotic ontology: an account of reality in which what-is is construed not through things, but through the patterned unfolding of meaning in context.

2 Reification as Ontological Error

If the world is not made of things but of relations, then how did it come to seem otherwise? The short answer is: we reified our own semiotic resources. We mistook our ways of meaning for the structure of the world. And once reified, those ways of meaning began to masquerade as metaphysical truths.

This is not a new insight. Philosophers from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein have warned of the perils of treating language as a transparent window on reality. What a relational ontology adds is a precise account of how reification works, and how deeply grammar is implicated in it.

From Meaning Function to Metaphysical Category

In the systemic-functional model, grammatical structure enacts meaning across three simultaneous metafunctions:

Experiential: construing experience as configurations of process, participant, and circumstance
Interpersonal: enacting roles and relationships between speakers
Textual: organising information flow in context

These are not domains of content, but functions of language in use. The clause functions simultaneously in all three ways — not to describe what is, but to enact meaning in context.

But when these grammatical functions are stripped of their semiotic role and treated as ontological categories, reification occurs:

The Subject becomes the essential Self
The Process becomes an Action or Force in the world
The Complement becomes a Thing that is acted upon

This is not simply a mistake in philosophical interpretation — it is a structural risk built into the architecture of the clause. Language construes meaning through function, but those functions are easily misread as entities.

God as Grammatical Projection

As explored in the earlier Grammar and the Ghost in the Machine series, one of the clearest examples of reification is theological:

In the beginning, God created...

This clause is not merely a declaration of faith. It is a projection of a particular semantic configuration: a Subject acting on a Complement through a transitive Process. And it sets the template for an entire metaphysics of agency. God becomes the ultimate Subject; creation becomes the ultimate action.

But this is not a neutral observation — it is a grammatical decision mistaken for metaphysical fact. The clause did not merely express belief in a creator; it structured belief around the transitive grammar of action. It became possible to imagine divinity itself in the image of the clause.

The same holds for Cartesian metaphysics. I think, therefore I am presumes that “I” is an independent Subject, thinking is an autonomous Process, and “being” is a resultant state. But each of these is a grammatical projection. There is no necessity that existence be transitive, or that subjectivity be singular and stable. The metaphysics derives from the syntax.

Science in the Image of the Clause

The same transitive logic finds its way into scientific discourse:

Gravity pulls.
Electrons flow.
Forces act.
Laws govern.

These are not simple descriptions. They are clauses: structured configurations of Subject, Process, and Complement. The world, in scientific narration, becomes a cascade of entities acting upon entities. Even where science resists metaphysical speculation, it often cannot escape grammatical reification.

In this light, both theology and science are not merely different genres of thought. They are semantic enactments shaped by the same underlying architecture: the clause as the organising unit of meaning, projected onto the cosmos.

Undoing the Illusion

To unthink reification is not to abandon meaning, but to locate it properly: not in the things language names, but in the systems of choice from which language draws.

This is the heart of Halliday’s system/instance framework. Systems are not categories of things; they are sets of potential relations. An instance does not point to an essence; it selects from a network of meaning possibilities. And over time, these selections form patterned tendencies — probabilistic potentials that evolve with use.

Reification short-circuits this dynamic. It freezes potential into substance. It treats the instantiation as the reality, and forgets the system that made it possible. It mistakes functional relation for ontological identity.

A relational ontology refuses this move. It keeps meaning in motion, refusing to let a semantic configuration harden into a metaphysical object.

3 Relational Being and the Cline of Instantiation

If language is not a system of labels for things, but a semiotic system for enacting meaning in context, then our ontology must reflect this. Being is not a state. It is a relation — and more precisely, a relation in motion.

This is the insight encoded in what Halliday called the cline of instantiation. The cline describes the relation between the system (the total meaning potential of a language or a speaker) and its instances (actual selections made in context). Meaning does not exist in either pole alone — it is the tension between them that constitutes semiosis.

To apply this to ontology is to say: what is, is what has been instantiated from potential. And what is not (yet) is still real — as potential.

Being as Selection from Meaning Potential

The cline of instantiation is not a continuum of degree, but a semiotic relation: a functional dependence of instance on system, and of system on the sum of its instantiations.

In this view:

A system is not a repository of rules or forms, but a structured potential — a network of options available for meaning.
An instance is not an object or utterance per se, but a selection: a particular realisation of meaning from that potential.

And over time, the instances themselves modify the potential. Meaning potential evolves by use.

This means that being is not fixed, but is inferred from patterns of instantiation. What something is cannot be defined in isolation, only in relation to the systems it realises and the contexts in which it is realised.

Relational Ontology: Not Essence, but Relation

Traditional metaphysics looks for essences — underlying substances or forms that define what a thing is. But in a relational ontology grounded in semiosis, essence gives way to relation:

A clause is not a thing, but a relation among systemic choices.
A person is not an essence, but a trajectory of instantiations across time and context.
Even identity is not a fixed self but a pattern of semiotic individuation — a personalisation of shared potential.

This perspective reshapes how we understand everything from agency to knowledge. A scientific law, for instance, is not a truth about reality but a pattern of meaning instantiations, regularised in a way that allows prediction. It is a kind of grammatical condensation: a semantic habit mistaken for a necessity.

Grammatical Being Is Not Ontological Being

The implications here are profound. If being is construed semiotically — and instantiated through grammar — then we must learn to distinguish grammatical being from ontological being.

To say The universe expands is not to identify an objective fact in neutral terms. It is to deploy a clause, with a Subject (the universe) and a Process (expands), in a transitive configuration. That configuration construes experience in a particular way — but does not prove that the universe is a ‘thing’ that ‘does’ something.

The clause realises a semantic construal, not a metaphysical entity.

And that is enough. For meaning does not require metaphysical guarantees — it requires semiotic accountability: coherence within a system of relations.

The Metaphysics of the Actual

In a relational ontology, the actual is not more real than the potential. It is simply more contextually salient. Potential meaning is not a shadowy prelude to reality — it is part of the architecture of being.

Every instance draws from a system; every system is shaped by instances. This reciprocal movement is the ontological rhythm of meaning: from potential to actual, and from actual back into potential, through memory, abstraction, and re-selection.

To be is to be instantiated.

To become is to be instantiated again — differently.

Part 4: The Individual as a Meaning System

What is a person?

Western thought often answers with some version of essentialism: the soul, the self, the rational mind, the subject of consciousness. But if we take the cline of instantiation seriously — if we understand meaning as a structured potential realised in context — then the individual is not a thing at all.

The individual is a system of meaning potential, continually reshaped by the meanings it instantiates and the meanings instantiated around it.

This is not a metaphor. It is a semiotic fact.

From System to Instance: Personalisation of Meaning

In Halliday’s framework, every speaker draws from the larger system of language — what he called the “meaning potential of the language as a whole.” But no individual realises the full system. Instead, each speaker develops a subsystem: a personalised repertoire of choices shaped by the contexts they’ve lived through, the meanings they’ve made, and the communities they inhabit.

This is individuation: the relation between the meaning potential of the system and the meaning potential of the individual.

Just as instances actualise the system, individuals are partial, patterned systems of the collective semiotic potential. The self is not separate from language. It is a particular way language has been actualised — and can be actualised again.

Instantiating the Self: Meaning as Becoming

If an individual is a system of meaning potential, then personhood is not a static identity but a trajectory of instantiations:

The meanings I have made are my history.
The meanings I can make are my potential.
The meanings I am making now are my becoming.

Every utterance is a selection — not just from the lexicon, but from the self. And over time, these selections accrue. Just as language evolves through use, so does the self. We become what we mean.

This is not a metaphorical claim. It is a grammatical one. The self is not a substance that uses language — it is a pattern of language in use.

The Individual as a Site of Semiotic Tension

What gives rise to individuality, then, is not separation from the system, but a particular relation to it.

Each individual negotiates tensions between:

Collective potential (language, culture, discourse)
Personal potential (the individual’s meaning system)
Instantial variation (the selections made moment by moment)

This triadic tension is where individuation lives. The self is not reducible to its system, nor to its instances. It is a site of semiotic resonance — where systemic meaning meets contextual selection in ways that are never fully predictable, never fully stable, and never entirely repeatable.

To speak is not only to mean. It is to become.

You Are Not a Thing. You Are a System.

This reframes our understanding of identity, agency, and social life. It means:

You are not a self-contained subject.
You are a semiotic self — a personalised organisation of meaning potential.
Your individuality is not prior to language.
It is realised through language, over time.

This also has ethical force. If each person is a system of meanings in motion — not a fixed category — then dialogue is not just interaction. It is a site of mutual becoming. To engage another person is to enter a shared field of potential. And what emerges is not given in advance.

5 The Relational Ethics of Meaning

Ethics as Semiotic Responsibility

If the individual is not a self-contained substance but a semiotic system of meaning in relation, then ethics is fundamentally about how we engage with that system—how we participate in each other’s meaning-making and individuation.

Ethics is not primarily about rules or laws. It is about responsibility in the unfolding of meaning.

To speak, listen, respond, and interpret is to affect the semiotic potentials of others — to alter their fields of possible meanings and identities.

Meaning is Never Solo

Because meaning is always realised in interaction — always relational — every act of communication is an ethical act.

When we speak, we do not simply transmit information. We enter into a dynamic process where:

We acknowledge the other’s meaning potential.
We negotiate meanings without fixing or reducing.
We create openings for alternative instantiations.

To deny the semiotic personhood of another — to treat them as a fixed object or a mere conduit — is to close down their potential to become.

The Ethics of Indeterminacy

Relational ontology acknowledges that meaning is never fully determined. This uncertainty is a source of creativity — but also of vulnerability.

Ethical meaning-making requires:

Tolerance for ambiguity — allowing meanings to unfold without premature closure.
Openness to transformation — embracing that identities and meanings evolve through interaction.
Careful listening — respecting how others instantiate their meaning potentials.

The ethical act is to support the semiotic freedom of the other, even when it challenges our own meanings.

Interdependence and Semiotic Ecology

Ethics emerges not just between isolated individuals, but within a web of semiotic relations — a shared ecology of meaning.

Our meanings depend on others’ meanings, and the community’s shared potentials.

This demands a relational humility:

Recognising that our own meaning potentials are co-constituted by others.
Understanding that we are part of a larger semiotic system, not autonomous islands.

Ethics is care for this semiotic ecosystem — nurturing the conditions for meaningful dialogue and shared becoming.

Conclusion: Ethics as Semiotic Praxis

In this relational ontology, ethics is an ongoing praxis of meaning — a continuous engagement with the semiotic potentials of self and other.

It demands that we approach communication as a shared creation, not a mere transaction.

And in doing so, we participate in the co-creation of selves, societies, and realities — always in flux, always becoming.

Coda: Becoming in Relation — The Future of Meaning

As we conclude this journey through a relational ontology of meaning, a vital insight emerges: the world is not composed of isolated things, but of relations — of meaning always in motion, always becoming.

This view invites us to rethink long-standing assumptions about self, knowledge, and reality itself. The individual is never a fixed entity, but a semiotic process continuously shaped by interaction with others. Meaning is not a static code or mere representation, but a living architecture enacted and re-enacted in dialogue.

Such a perspective transforms philosophy, science, and theology — revealing how much of what we call “reality” is an unfolding semiotic performance, a dance of potentials actualised through encounter.

The implications are profound:

For identity: We are not born but made — constantly individuating through relation.
For knowledge: Truths are not fixed but provisional, emerging through semiotic negotiation.
For ethics: Responsibility lies in nurturing others’ meaning potentials, sustaining the shared semiotic ecosystem.
For being: Existence itself is less a “thing” and more a becoming, a dynamic web of relational meaning.

To embrace this is to live with humility and openness — to recognise that our own meanings and selves are intertwined with the world’s ongoing story.

The path ahead is one of continuous dialogue — with others, with ourselves, and with the ever-unfolding semiotic cosmos.

In the end, to be is to mean — and to mean is to relate.

26 June 2025

The Semiotic Child: Ontogenesis and the Individuation of Meaning

1 Learning to Mean: The Semiotic Birth of the Self

Introduction

Traditional accounts of language acquisition often depict the child as a passive recipient of a linguistic code—a system of signs to be decoded and mastered. Language is framed as a cipher linking words to objects or concepts, and the child’s success lies in memorising and applying these mappings. While this perspective offers a practical view of language learning, it fails to capture the profound semiotic processes through which the child becomes a meaning-maker and a self.

This post proposes a semiotic reconstrual of ontogenesis, in which the child is born not with language but into meaning potential—a structured, socially embedded system of possibilities. Learning to mean is thus not simply about acquiring vocabulary or syntax but about enacting the very architecture of thought and identity through interaction with others.

Meaning Potential and Semiotic Ontogenesis

The world the child enters is saturated with signs, conventions, and cultural forms, all organised as a system of potential meanings. This system is not an inert code but a dynamic meaning potential—a network of relations and choices that can be actualised in many ways.

From birth, the child is immersed in this semiotic environment, but the meaning potential remains unactualised until it is instantiated in interaction. Thus, the child’s acquisition of language is not a passive decoding process but an active instantiation of meaning potentials within a social context.

Language Acquisition as Individuation

To mean is to participate in a social practice, deploying signs in ways that are intelligible and relevant within a community. The child does not simply imitate or replicate language forms; rather, through repeated instantiations, the child shapes a unique semiotic identity—a process known as individuation.

Individuation here is ontogenetic: the self emerges as the child internalises social meanings and simultaneously transforms the meaning potential through their own creative acts. This dialectic between system and instance is foundational to semiotic theory and critical to understanding language as more than code.

The Role of Interaction and Dialogue

Crucial to this process is dialogue—the reciprocal exchange of meaning between the child and caregivers or peers. The caregiver’s language, gestures, and responses provide scaffolding within which the child experiments with meaning.

This dynamic aligns with Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development but extends it into the semiotic realm: the child’s potential to mean expands through mediated interaction, which progressively internalises as their own semiotic repertoire.

The Architecture of Thought and Selfhood

What develops is not merely linguistic competence but the very architecture of thought—the capacity to construe experience, enact relationships, and project an identity situated in social space. Language acquisition is thus a process of becoming a self through the semiotic mediation of meaning potential.

In this light, the “miracle” is not learning language as code but the semiotic birth of the self—an ongoing co-creation of meaning and identity through social interaction.

Conclusion

The semiotic birth of the self reframes language acquisition as an ontogenetic process of meaning-making and individuation. This perspective foregrounds the child as an active agent in dialogue with a rich social system of potential meanings, emphasising interaction, creativity, and identity formation.

In the beginning was the interaction — and through it, meaning was made flesh.

2 Bootstrapping Meaning: The Role of Caregiver-Child Interaction

Introduction

The semiotic birth of the self, as explored in Part 1, unfolds not in isolation but in dialogue — a reciprocal, socially mediated process. The infant enters a world dense with meaning potential but requires interaction with caregivers to begin actualising that potential. This post examines the pivotal role of caregiver–child interaction in bootstrapping the child’s meaning-making abilities and shaping the emergent self.

Interaction as the Crucible of Meaning

Meaning potential, though structured and socially embedded, cannot actualise itself. It is through interaction—dynamic, responsive exchanges with caregivers—that the child learns how to deploy semiotic resources.

Caregivers provide not only linguistic input but also socio-emotional scaffolding. Their attuned responses, gestures, and vocalisations guide the child’s early attempts to make meaning, modelling the conventions and relations that constitute the semiotic system.

A Semiotic Reading of the Zone of Proximal Development

Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is a foundational concept in developmental psychology, describing how learners can perform beyond their current abilities through social mediation.

Reinterpreted semiotically, the ZPD highlights how the caregiver’s support extends the child’s access to meaning potential. Interaction situates the child within a space where semiotic resources are co-constructed and progressively internalised, enabling the child to appropriate and personalise meaning-making.

From Social Semiotic to Individual Meaning-Maker

Through repeated instantiations within interaction, the child not only internalises social meanings but begins to individualise—to transform and extend the system of meaning potential in ways unique to their own developing semiotic self.

The caregiver–child dialogue thus acts as a crucible for semiotic individuation, facilitating the child’s gradual emergence as an autonomous meaning-maker, while remaining embedded in a network of social relations.

The Dialectic of Sociality and Individuation

This process involves a constant dialectic: the child negotiates between the inherited social semiotic system and their own innovative deployments, shaping both their selfhood and the semiotic resources available to their community.

Meaning-making is not simply socialisation but a dynamic interplay where the child’s agency and creativity gradually reshape meaning potential itself.

Conclusion

Caregiver–child interaction is the essential bootstrap that transforms latent meaning potential into instantiated semiotic practice. This mediated dialogue scaffolds the child’s entry into the architecture of thought and identity, enabling the semiotic birth of the self to unfold.

By recognising the social genesis of meaning, we better appreciate how selfhood is not a solitary given but a co-constructed achievement arising from the crucible of interaction.

3 From System to Self: Personalising Meaning Potential

Introduction

If caregiver–child interaction is the crucible in which the child begins to mean, then what follows is a transformation more subtle and more profound: the individuation of meaning potential. This part explores how the child moves from shared meaning systems to a personalised semiotic repertoire, through the lens of Halliday’s system/instance architecture.

Halliday’s Architecture: System and Instance

At the heart of Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics is the distinction between:

System: The network of meaning potential — the range of options available in a semiotic system.
Instance: A specific selection from the system — an actualised meaning in a particular context.

In the adult language system, every utterance is an instance that draws from and contributes to the evolving system. But for the child, the system is not yet internalised. Instead, it is borrowed, bootstrapped through interaction, and then progressively made one's own.

Instantiation as Semiotic Ontogenesis

The process of acquiring language is, from this view, a cascade of instantiations:

The child enters into interaction where meaning is instantiated by the caregiver.
The child responds, initially mimicking but soon modifying — an emergent agent of semiotic choice.
Over time, these patterned instantiations become structured as instantial systems — localised meaning potentials that begin to stabilise.
These systems accumulate, diversify, and complexify — feeding back into the child’s personal meaning potential.

This gradual accumulation is not mere learning. It is ontogenesis: the birth of a semiotic system that is uniquely configured by the child’s history of instantiation.

Individuation: From Shared System to Personal Meaning

The concept of individuation explains how this process diverges from mere replication of the collective semiotic. While the community offers a shared meaning potential, each child’s interactional history is unique. That history configures:

What meanings are more likely to be instantiated.
How meanings co-occur and pattern.
Which options are foregrounded, backgrounded, or innovatively combined.

The child thus comes to embody a personalised grammar — not a private language, but a distinct meaning profile that reflects their social positioning, emotional resonances, and dialogic pathways.

The Self as a System

By this view, the self is not a substance or a centre, but a semiotic engine — an evolving system of meaning potential shaped through instantiation, responsive to context, and creative in its ongoing individuation.

And just as the child begins by learning to mean with others’ systems, they eventually mean through their own. The process is never finished: individuation continues across the lifespan, as new instantiations restructure what is possible.

Conclusion

What we call the self is the local realisation of a broader semiotic architecture. Through repeated instantiation, structured by interaction and saturated with social meaning, the child becomes not just a participant in language, but a unique configuration of it.

To become a self is to personalise the system — to make the general specific, the social personal, the potential actual.

4 The Emergence of Voice: Individuation Becomes Expression

Introduction

A child does not merely acquire language — they come to possess a voice. Not a set of sounds, but a stance: a way of meaning that is distinctively theirs. Voice is the semiotic fingerprint of individuation, the external trace of an internal system shaped by a history of interaction.

In this final part, we explore how the personalisation of meaning potential — the individuation of the self — is enacted as expression, and how voice serves as the signature of a semiotic self in motion.

Voice as Semiotic Expression

In systemic-functional terms, voice is the outward actualisation of a meaning potential that has been individuated through interaction. It is what happens when the evolving instantial system of the child — now increasingly stable, increasingly patterned — engages with context to make meaning:

In ideational terms, voice construes experience in a way that reflects the child’s pathways of attention and valuation.
In interpersonal terms, voice enacts relationships, often marked by subtle inflections of power, solidarity, and affect.
In textual terms, voice weaves information into discourse in ways that pattern cohesion, emphasis, and flow.

Voice, then, is the interface between system and world, between the internalised repertoire and the demands of the moment. It is both a trace of where one has come from, and a projection of where one stands.

Individuation as Precondition for Voice

Voice is not given. It arises from semiotic individuation: the unique configuration of probabilities across systems of meaning.

This means that:

Voice is cumulative: built over time, sedimented in recurrent choices.
Voice is dialogic: shaped by the semiotic others with whom one interacts.
Voice is dynamic: it shifts across contexts, but with a continuity that marks it as personal.

It is not enough to participate in language; to have voice is to make language one’s own. In this sense, individuation is the enabling condition of voice, and voice is its most audible achievement.

From Modelling to Meaning: Caregivers and the Scaffolding of Voice

The role of the caregiver is not simply to model the system, but to co-author voice. Through their attunement, expansion, and semiotic mirroring, caregivers:

Reinforce patterns of meaning that anchor identity.
Introduce variability and new options that expand potential.
Validate expressions that deviate from norm, thereby legitimising difference.

Voice emerges not from imitation but from negotiation — the ongoing improvisation between systemic possibilities and personal instantiations.

Voice Across the Lifespan

Although forged in early childhood, voice is not fixed. It remains permeable, pliable, and responsive to the unfolding history of the self. As individuation continues, so too does the evolution of voice.

It may become richer through diversity of contexts.
It may become fractured under conditions of trauma or marginalisation.
It may become empowered when socially validated or amplified.

Voice is not just what one says, but how one becomes through saying.

Conclusion: The Semiotic Self in Expression

To learn language is to enter a meaning system; to become a self is to configure that system in uniquely patterned ways; to have voice is to express that configuration in interaction.

Voice is the audible, visible, legible signature of individuation.

It is the moment where the child — now a self — not only participates in meaning but contributes to its ongoing evolution. In voice, the semiotic child becomes the semiotic self: a locus of potential, instantiated in every act of meaning.

25 June 2025

When Grammar Pretends to Be God: Reifying the Clause in Theology and Science

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:

God is Subject.
Logos is Process.
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:

Being becomes equated with clause-level Subjecthood.
Action becomes the privileged mode of reality.
Creation is construed as a one-way process, not a dialogue.
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.

Subject: force, energy, gravity, evolution
Process: moves, pulls, adapts, causes
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:

A particle interacts with a field.
The Higgs boson gives mass to other particles.
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:

I see a bird.
I feel tired.
I know the answer.
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.

I want
I believe
I remember
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.

Coda: When Language Turns to Look at Itself

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.

Series summary:

When Grammar Pretends to Be God has tracked the reification of grammatical structures across theology, science, and selfhood. The same transitive fantasy underwrites divine creation, Newtonian causality, and Cartesian consciousness.

It is not reality that speaks through grammar — it is grammar that speaks reality into being.