Abstract

Ordinary speech about persons is not metaphysically inert. The grammatical and lexical choices speakers make when referring to parents, spouses, colleagues, and strangers encode competing ontologies of the human person. This paper distinguishes two such ontologies—a relational ontology, in which identity is constituted through role-embeddedness, and an agent-centered ontology, in which identity is constituted through independent action—and argues that the linguistic markers of each (possessive constructions, kinship terms, descriptor substitutions, and de-naming) function as indices of underlying commitments about obligation, conflict, and the durability of ties. Drawing on sociolinguistics, role theory, family-systems research, and cultural psychology, the paper contends that shifts in referential language often precede behavioral shifts and can serve as early-warning signals of relational breakdown at the interpersonal and institutional levels. Implications for the study of family stability, organizational cohesion, and the legitimacy of authority are discussed.

Keywords: relational ontology, agent-centered ontology, kinship terms, linguistic relativity, role theory, de-naming

Problem Statement

A person who refers to his mother as “my mother” and a person who refers to the same woman as “that woman who raised me” are not merely exercising stylistic preference. They are, in the strict sense, making ontological claims. The first locates the referent inside a structure of obligation and belonging; the second extracts her from that structure and renders her a discrete agent whose actions may be evaluated without reference to any prior bond. Such choices are pervasive in everyday talk, and yet they are routinely treated as surface features of personality or mood rather than as expressions of what a speaker takes a person fundamentally to be.

This under-recognition is costly. Clinicians, mediators, managers, and ministers frequently encounter relational breakdowns whose onset was signaled, long before overt conflict, by changes in how the parties referred to one another (Tannen, 2007). The linguistic drift from “my husband” to “he” to “the father of my children” to a proper name with no relational qualifier tracks, with uncanny reliability, a drift in the underlying conception of the relationship itself. The same pattern appears in organizational life when “our director” becomes “management” becomes “them.” What looks like a semantic trifle turns out to be an index of something substantial: a reorganization of the speaker’s social ontology.

The argument of this paper is that two broad ontologies are at work in contemporary speech, that they are marked by identifiable linguistic features, and that the features are predictive of how speakers will frame conflict, assess obligation, and manage distance. The ontologies will be called, following common usage in philosophy and sociology, role-embedded and agent-centered (MacIntyre, 2007; Taylor, 1989).

Two Ontological Models

The Role-Embedded Model

In the role-embedded model, the person is constituted by the web of relations in which he stands. A man is not primarily a free agent who happens to have a father; he is a son, and that fact is not incidental to who he is. Identity on this view is received before it is chosen, and its received portion is not a constraint on some prior self but the material out of which any self is built. MacIntyre (2007) articulated the position forcefully: “I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation” (p. 220). To strip these away is not to find the real self underneath but to dissolve the self entirely.

Historically, this is the model assumed in most premodern societies and in the biblical text. Scripture identifies persons by relational coordinates as a matter of course: Isaac is “the son of Abraham,” Joshua is “the son of Nun,” and the commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12, KJV) presupposes that filial identity is not optional or revocable. Household codes in the New Testament (Ephesians 5–6; Colossians 3) assume that husbands, wives, children, and servants occupy positions whose meaning is relational before it is individual. The naming scenes of Genesis likewise treat naming as the establishment of relationship, not merely the assignment of a label.

The Agent-Centered Model

In the agent-centered model, the person is constituted by his own actions and choices. Relations are contracts entered into by antecedently existing agents and may be exited when they cease to serve the agent’s purposes. Bellah et al. (1985) documented the ascendancy of this model in late-twentieth-century American life, tracing its roots to philosophical individualism and its expression in what they called the “therapeutic” and “expressive” vocabularies of self-realization. Taylor (1989) located its philosophical origins in a long shift from honor to dignity, from fixed rank to inward authenticity.

On this model, “father” is a biographical fact about a man rather than a constitutive feature of his son’s identity. The son remains fully himself whether or not the relationship persists, and the question of whether to maintain it becomes a matter of cost-benefit evaluation. Obligation is a function of ongoing consent rather than of standing position.

Cultural and Historical Context

Cross-cultural psychology offers converging evidence that these models are not merely individual idiosyncrasies but cluster-level differences between cultures. Triandis (1995) and Hofstede (2001) distinguished individualist from collectivist societies along lines that closely track the agent-centered and role-embedded ontologies, respectively. Nisbett (2003) extended the analysis to cognition itself, arguing that speakers in collectivist contexts attend to relations and fields, while speakers in individualist contexts attend to objects and attributes. Family-systems theorists working within American clinical practice (Bowen, 1978; Kerr & Bowen, 1988) observed the same divide within a single culture: families and individuals vary in the degree to which members experience themselves as differentiated selves or as members of an emotional unit.

Linguistic Markers

If two ontologies are in circulation, speech should show it. It does.

Possessives and descriptors. The possessive construction “my father” asserts a relation that binds the speaker and the referent. The descriptor construction “that man” or “the individual who raised me” suspends the relation and treats the referent as a datum. A speaker may shift between these within a single conversation, and the shift is rarely arbitrary. Goffman (1981) noted that such alternations are part of what he called “footing”: subtle repositionings of the speaker relative to the referent that listeners register even when they do not consciously mark them. Silverstein (1976) formalized the more general principle that referring expressions are indexical—they do not merely denote but situate.

Kinship terms versus proper names. In role-embedded speech, kinship terms appear where names could have been used: “Mother is coming to dinner.” In agent-centered speech, proper names appear where kinship terms could have been used: “Linda is coming to dinner.” Wierzbicka (1992) argued that the distribution of such usages across languages reflects culturally specific scripts about what relations are for. The substitution of a name for a title is not neutral; it flattens the vertical structure of the relationship and places the referent on a plane of nominal equality with the speaker.

Naming and de-naming. A further, more aggressive form of the same operation is de-naming: refusing the referent any relational designation at all. “She” or “that person” in place of “my sister” performs what Tannen (2007) described as discursive distancing. In extreme cases, the referent is named only by an impersonal role (“the plaintiff,” “the defendant,” “the ex”) that signals the severance of the personal tie and the substitution of an abstract one. Divorce discourse is a rich site for this phenomenon, as is estrangement within families of origin.

Pronominal strategies. The shift from first-person plural (“we,” “our family”) to first-person singular combined with third-person reference (“I,” “they”) tracks the dissolution of a joint identity. Pennebaker (2011) found in large-corpus studies that pronoun use is a sensitive marker of psychological state and relational orientation; the markers are often inaccessible to conscious manipulation and thus reveal what speakers may not wish to disclose.

Behavioral Implications

The ontologies encoded in speech are not merely descriptive. They shape what speakers do.

Conflict framing. Within the role-embedded ontology, conflict between a son and his father is trouble within an enduring relationship that both parties are obligated to repair. Within the agent-centered ontology, the same conflict is evidence that the relationship may have ceased to serve the parties and is therefore a candidate for dissolution. Lakoff (1996) showed how framing metaphors do this kind of work at the political level; the same operation is routine at the familial and collegial levels. A speaker who refers to his father as “my father” is under pressure, grammatically and conceptually, to treat the conflict as internal to a relation he cannot exit. A speaker who refers to his father as “that man” has already performed the exit linguistically and need only ratify it behaviorally.

Obligation persistence versus dissolution. Scripture assumes that obligations arising from role persist independent of sentiment. The command to honor parents is not conditioned on their performance, and the Apostle Paul’s instructions to servants and masters in Ephesians 6 presuppose that the obligations of position hold even under strain. This is the characteristic logic of the role-embedded model. The agent-centered model, by contrast, treats obligation as consent-based and therefore as terminable. Nock (1998) documented the contractualization of marriage in American law and culture as one large-scale instance of this shift, and the linguistic markers—spouses referring to one another as “partners” rather than as husband and wife—preceded and accompanied the legal change.

Emotional distance strategies. Bowen’s (1978) notion of “emotional cutoff”—the unilateral severance of contact with a family member as a means of managing unresolved tension—is almost always prepared for in speech before it is enacted in behavior. The referent is progressively de-named, then spoken of in the past tense, then not spoken of at all. Kerr and Bowen (1988) argued that cutoff does not resolve the underlying tension but displaces it, and the linguistic pattern they described is now widely observed in clinical practice (Titelman, 2003).

Institutional Consequences

What holds for dyads and families holds, with appropriate adjustments, for institutions.

Family stability. Families in which members habitually refer to one another by relational titles—”my brother,” “our mother”—display more durable ties than families in which members habitually use proper names or descriptors for the same referents (Galvin et al., 2019). The relationship between language and stability is plausibly bidirectional: stable families generate relational speech, and relational speech reinforces stable families. But the predictive power of linguistic markers in clinical and marital research suggests that the direction from speech to behavior is real and nontrivial (Gottman & Silver, 1999).

Organizational cohesion. Organizations function analogously. When members speak of “our team,” “our director,” and “our mission,” they invoke a role-embedded ontology in which the organization is constitutive of members’ work identity. When members speak of “the company,” “management,” and “the job,” they have performed a partial exit, treating the organization as a contractor of discrete services rather than a locus of belonging. Pfeffer (1981) and later scholars of organizational symbolism observed that such linguistic patterns predict turnover, citizenship behavior, and resistance to change more reliably than many attitudinal measures.

Authority legitimacy. Legitimacy is particularly sensitive to naming. Weber’s (1978) classical analysis of authority distinguished traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal forms; each is sustained by a characteristic vocabulary of address. When subordinates cease to use titles of office—”the pastor,” “the captain,” “the professor”—and substitute proper names or impersonal descriptors, the authority of the office is linguistically eroded before it is behaviorally challenged. The biblical pattern of addressing elders with titles of honor (1 Timothy 5:1–2, 17) is not a matter of etiquette but of preserving the linguistic conditions under which legitimate authority can be exercised. A congregation that refers to its pastor only by first name has not necessarily lost respect for him, but it has altered the linguistic ecology in which respect is maintained, and such alterations tend not to be stable.

Conclusion

Speech about persons is dense with ontological commitment. The choice between “my father” and “that man,” between a title and a proper name, between “we” and “they,” is a choice about what kind of thing a person is and what kind of thing a relationship is. Two ontologies compete in contemporary speech: one that treats persons as constituted by their roles and relations, and another that treats persons as independent agents whose relations are contingent on ongoing consent. Each is marked by identifiable linguistic features, and each carries downstream consequences for how conflicts are framed, how obligations are weighed, and how institutions hold together.

Because the linguistic markers are comparatively stable and comparatively accessible, they function well as early-warning signals. Shifts in referential language routinely precede shifts in behavior—in marriages, in families of origin, in workplaces, in congregations. Those concerned with relational repair and institutional health do well to attend to the speech that surrounds them, and to their own. The tongue, as Scripture observes, is a small member that accomplishes large things (James 3:5). What it accomplishes, among much else, is the quiet construction and dismantling of the social worlds in which we live.

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