In most traditions of thought, time is assumed to be a fixed and universal backdrop—an abstract container in which things happen. But what if time, rather than being a container, were a construct—a way of cutting across potential to produce the experience of unfolding? What if time was not something we move through, but something that moves through us, shaped and reshaped by the ways we construe meaning?
In this post, we want to explore this question by weaving together two strands: the richly elaborated construals of time in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), and the deeper ontological account offered by a relational perspective in which time is no longer a given, but a perspectival effect of meaning in motion.
1. Time in Systemic Functional Linguistics: A Multifunctional Construal
SFL offers a powerful array of resources for understanding how language construes time—not as a singular phenomenon, but as a complex, multifunctional system of meanings. From this view, time is not "represented" in language, but enacted through choices made in grammar and semantics. Several key systems illustrate this point.
Metafunctional Time
Language construes time differently across each of the three metafunctions:
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Experiential time treats time as part of the world: when things happen, how long they last, how often they recur.
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Interpersonal time emerges in interaction: how speakers negotiate temporality relative to the "now" (e.g. tense, usuality, obligation).
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Textual time organises meaning across the unfolding of discourse: how the text structures its own temporality, whether through narrative ordering or thematic progression.
This reveals that there is no single temporal axis in language—only multiple orientations, each shaping a different slice of the temporal field.
Extent and Location
Two key circumstantial systems elaborate time further:
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Extent construes how far a process stretches through time (duration) or how often it recurs (frequency).
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Location situates the process in time—when it unfolds—but also includes metaphorical paths of temporal movement, such as beginnings, middles, and ends.
Time, here, is spatialised—measured, located, traversed—but all within the fabric of meaning.
Tense: Temporal Logic
Tense is not merely a reflection of past, present, or future. It defines a temporal reference point, which becomes the anchor for further logical relations. This allows for a complex layering of time—e.g. “She had been waiting” construes not just a past event, but one that began before another past reference point.
Tense turns time into a semantic logic of relation, rather than a timeline of absolute positions.
Phase: The Ontology of Becoming
Phase introduces a different kind of temporality—one that doesn’t just position events, but stages them:
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A process may be inceptive (just beginning), durative (ongoing), or conclusive (ending).
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Crucially, this system begins to speak not of time as background, but of becoming as process: the unfolding of something from potential into reality.
At its most suggestive, SFL itself notes that “at the deepest level, time-phase and reality-phase are the same thing.” Time here is not just a category—it is a trace of emergence.
2. Time in Relational Ontology: Construal in Motion
While SFL describes how language construes time, relational ontology asks a more radical question:
What if time itself is nothing but a product of construal?
From this view, there is no universal "time" in which things unfold. Instead, what we experience as time is the result of perspectival cuts across a field of potential—a system of possible relations, meanings, and events. When we speak, act, perceive, or imagine, we make a cut: we bring something into being as an instance of meaning. And it is this act of instantiation—the construal of difference, motion, dependency—that is the experience of time.
Let’s now reinterpret the SFL notions through this ontological lens.
Metafunctional Time as Perspectival Cuts
The three metafunctions offer not distinct timelines, but three cuts through relational potential:
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Experiential construals produce time as externalised sequence—events “happening.”
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Interpersonal construals enact time as positioning within subjectivity—expectation, urgency, modality.
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Textual construals organise time as meaning in motion—how construal itself unfolds.
Time is not built into these dimensions—they are different ways in which construal temporalises relation.
Extent and Location as Modal Architecture
Duration, frequency, path, and position are not properties of time—they are modal construals of how meaning unfolds. A process that lasts "for three years" is not unfolding in time, but being construed as a temporally extended relation. Likewise, "by the end of the week" is not a fixed endpoint, but a construal of directionality within the logic of instantiation—the structuring of an instance as it emerges.
Tense as Projection of Potential
Tense doesn't encode time; it projects possible instances from a reference point within the unfolding of meaning. It allows the speaker to construe dependencies: what follows what, what precedes what, what might follow next. It is time as a logic of construal, not as a container for events.
Phase as Thresholds of Instantiation
Phase is not merely the temporal shape of a process (beginning, continuing, ending), but a semiotic construal of instantiation-in-motion. It tracks how an instance is staged from within a system of potential—not how something occurs in time, but how meaning comes into view through a perspectival cut.
The earlier insight that “time-phase and reality-phase are the same thing” aligns here: time is not a setting in which reality occurs. Rather, time is the construal of becoming, the cut through which reality takes shape as event.
3. From Description to Explanation
SFL gives us a precise description of how time is construed in meaning; relational ontology provides an explanation of how these construals emerge:
| SFL Time | Relational Reinterpretation |
|---|---|
| Metafunctional Time | Perspectives on unfolding potential |
| Extent and Location | Modal construals of unfolding and direction |
| Tense | Logical projection of interdependent instances |
| Phase | Semiotic staging of instantiation from potential |
| "Time-phase = reality-phase" | Ontological claim: time is the perspectival construal of becoming |
4. Conclusion: Time as Meaning in Motion
Rather than treating time as a fixed axis along which meaning travels, this perspective invites us to see time as the motion of meaning itself—a series of perspectival cuts across relational potential.
Language doesn't merely refer to time. It temporalises meaning. And when we move from tense to phase, from location to unfolding, from frequency to construal, what we are tracking is not time, but the becoming of meaning—the motion from potential to instance.
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