Some linguists claim to have found languages that do not have distinct classes of nouns and verbs.¹⁴⁰ Leonard Bloomfield^§0.4a worked for two years with Alfredo Viola Santiago, a Tagalog speaker and Filipino architectural engineering student at the University of Illinois. Starting with source texts in the form of a number of traditional stories told by his informant, Bloomfield proceeded to analyze the language, over four hundred pages in what has since been recognized as one of the masterworks of descriptive linguistics.

In Tagalog, Bloomfield points out, a word can be put to several kinds of use. The same word, sumusulat, can be used to refer to “the person writing” (noun), the act “he is writing” (verb), and an attribute “the writing child” (adjective). The differences between the meanings are marked by the context of the sentence.¹⁴¹ This is not to say that Tagalog cannot make the distinction between an entity (in this case an abstract concept) and an action, but that the grammatical distinction is not necessarily marked in the form of a distinct word.

As for parts of speech in general, linguist Emmon Bach concludes, “differences in parts of speech only exist at a superficial level.”¹⁴² Fellow linguist Edward Sapir^§AS1.3.1c says that parts of speech do “not merely grade into each other but are to an astonishing degree actually convertible into each other.” The preposition “to” can be used to indicate place, “he came to the house” or this can also be represented as an action, “he reached the house.” His conclusion? “ … that ‘part of speech’ reflects not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to construct reality into a variety of formal patterns … Each language has its own scheme.”

Such is the scope of linguistic diversity. Although, Sapir says, there is perhaps one universal (and here he contradicts Bloomfield and others), “no language fails to distinguish between a noun and a verb, though in particular cases the nature of the distinction may be an elusive one.”¹⁴³

The difference between entity and action may only be in the form of our representation, or what Peter Gärdenfors calls the mode of mental scanning,¹⁴⁴ where action is seen in the representation of things across time, and entity is a mental scan that shows the consequences of action in the constitution of some thing, conceived now as an object momentarily fixed in space.

To make things more complex, in all languages there are intermediate forms, things that are not distinctly states or actions. In English, “I write,” the action, is clearly different from “the writing,” the entity, and we can see the difference marked in the different words, “write” and “writing.” But what is the gerund, “writing,” in the sentence “writing is enlightening”? And what is the infinitive “to write” in the sentence “to write is to enlighten”? Or the gerundive nominal, “being eager,” in “John’s being eager to please.” Or the derived nominal, “eagerness” in “John’s eagerness to please.”¹⁴⁵ These meanings lie at intermediate places as meanings move along a path between an action and an entity.

So, not only can nouns be made verbs and verbs be made nouns. There are many intermediate points across the path of transposition between nouns and verbs – or, in a more broadly framed multimodal grammar, a wide spectrum of middle places in the everyday transpositional traffic between entities and actions.

***

The rise of quantum mechanics,^§AS1.3.1a either as a supplement to or replacement of Newtonian physics, aligned nicely with the zeitgeist of the twentieth century. Matter could be transformed into energy. Particles could be conceived as waves. The uncertainty principle told us that at the smallest of scales, either position or speed can be accurately measured but not both.

When we propose to see states and actions, not as distinct things in the mechanics of ordinary experience, but as always-ready-to-be-transposed, one for the other and with many ambiguous midpoints along the way, we are suggesting something that might be conceived as a quantum grammar.^§AS1.4.4b Where traditional grammars have conventionally identified entities and actions as two distinct and separate kinds of circumstance, making a foundational distinction between nouns and verbs for instance, we want to trace the dynamic where states and actions are always transposable, and where there are innumerable, equivocal intermediate positions. Entities and actions are not separable circumstances, but transitory orientations to circumstance. Entities and actions are integral elements of circumstance, always in a state of torsion.

If quantum mechanics upended the old physics, a parallel disquiet was created in twentieth-century philosophy. Here is a paraphrase of Henri Bergson, famed philosopher at the Collège de France: the problem of philosophy to date had been to freeze reality into entities and their states for the purposes of construing it as facts (the empiricists) or concepts (the rationalists). Naming words deceive to the extent that they seem to denote changeless things. Conceptual analysis tends to freeze reality into entities. Images deceive to the extent that they freeze objects and persons in moments of time. Instead, we need to conceive reality in cinematographic terms, as movement and change.¹⁴⁶

Not only are things on the move, where apparent entities present themselves as mere momentary appearances in a universe of action. The person experiencing things is always in a process of becoming, formed by the ever-changing experiences of their life where the immediate frame of experience is always changing too, and where “the same antecedents will never recur.”¹⁴⁷ The human species should be conceived more as homo faber, the creature who works to make the world, than homo sapiens, the creature who freezes the world in his conceptualizations, as do naming word or still image.¹⁴⁸ Experience is a process of “ceaseless self-creation.”¹⁴⁹ For this, Bergson proposes a metaphysics of “integral experience” whose capacity to capture movement and change is grounded in its methods of “qualitative differentiations and integrations.”¹⁵⁰

To re-say this in the terms of our grammar, the world is a place of active meaning designing, where the conditions of designing – the available resources for design action and the designed outcomes of our actions – are never quite the same, where exact repetition is never possible even if the similarities of word or image might lead us to think that. It is the action of designing that is more critical to our understanding of the meaning of reality than the apparently static objects of design that are mere residues of the past or the designed objects that become the legacy for another future.

Little wonder Bergson had a preoccupation with change, as the debris of the catastrophic twentieth century fell around him. He had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927 for his philosophical writings.^§AS1.3.1a But when, near the end of his life, the Nazis invaded Paris, he renounced all the French honors he had been awarded, and stood in line in inclement weather to register as a Jew.¹⁵¹

***

Early in his long career, Alfred North Whitehead had, with his former student Bertrand Russell, written the monumental Principia Mathematica.^§1a Starting a second career at age 63, he moved from the University of London to Harvard University. Here, he turned his focus from mathematics to philosophy of meaning.

In 1927 he was invited to give the famed Gifford lectures. In other years, William James, Hannah Arendt, and John Dewey have lectured. Often the lecture hall had been packed, as was it was in anticipation of Whitehead’s first lecture. His topic: “Process and Reality.”

But by the second and subsequent lectures, the numbers dwindled down to half a dozen stalwarts, the material was so dense. Had he not known who Whitehead was, said one member of the audience, he “would have suspected that it was an imposter making it up as he went along.” The year before, he had given a series of five lectures at the University of Illinois, an early version of his Gifford lectures, where according to one wit, “the philosophers did not understand the lectures but hoped the mathematicians did, and the mathematicians did not understand the lectures but hoped the philosophers did.”¹⁵²

Later, Whitehead’s Gifford lectures were published as a book of over four hundred pages. The first edition was riddled with typographical errors, and editors of a later edition had to go through a torturous process of trying to figure out what Whitehead had meant.¹⁵³ Late in his life and with things he urgently needed to say, Whitehead had little patience for proofreading.

Acknowledging his debt to Bergson, Whitehead addresses two contradictory biases in modern philosophy – objectivist and subjectivist orientations to experience – and maps these onto parallel biases in the everyday human representation of experience. Francis Bacon’s scientific method of observation and induction tended to find static things in the world by virtue of its objectivist, empiricist orientation. So too mathematics tends to assume through oversimplification that each additional one-object is for the purpose of enumeration namable as the same object as the previous one. This is a radically revisionary thought from a co-author of Principia Mathematica.

Language also leads us to objectification, where the subject as an object precedes and is separated from the predicate as action. By these means, we tend to atomize “the extensive continuum of the world” into separate entities. “We analyze the world in terms of static categories.” We spatialize the universe at the expense of fluency. We freeze moments in time at the expense of the life history of the object. We relegate “each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of a novel ‘one’.”

However, says Whitehead, in reality nothing is so static and repetitive. No subject experiences the same thing twice. Whitehead likes Locke’s^§1.3a bleak phrase; our experience of the world is one of “perpetual perishing.” “We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience.”¹⁵⁴

In other moments of science and everyday experience, however, we do the opposite, we tend to subjectivize. Such is the occupational hazard of philosophical rationalism or purely Analytical Philosophy where we can deduce meanings from the syntax of language or the logic of mathematics. (Again, this from a co-author of Principia Mathematica.) We make the mistake of working from the “tacit assumption of the mind as subject and of its contents as predicates.” This blinds the meaning-maker to the wholeness of the world; “the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection … Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.” So too in everyday life, “we must … avoid the solipsism of the present moment.”¹⁵⁵

Whitehead’s philosophy of process sets an ambitious agenda, “to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” It lays out “metaphysical first principles,” by means of which to identify the wholeness of the world in its infinite diversity, a “flux of things” in which “all things flow.” Making a part of this journey in science, “Newton ordered fluency back into the world” with his Theory of Fluxions, or the mathematics of calculus.^§1.3.2d However, this same mathematics could slip back, only “to atomize the extensive continuum” into static, infinitesimal datapoints.

Reaching first principles in the last sentence of his lectures, Whitehead speaks to the process of experience as an “insistent craving, … [a] zest for existence … refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”¹⁵⁶ This, in our terms, is how we live transposition.

***

Entity. An object or state captured by its representation in space at a moment in time: a person, an object, a space, an abstraction.

An entity is something distinguishable, such as a person, object, space, or abstraction.

Entities are the consequences of actions. Entities can act with consequences. But, for a moment at least, they might be conceived in their particularity, as instances. When someone acts to instantiate, the entity produced is an instantiation.

Also, entities can exist in their generality. When someone acts to conceptualize, the entity produced is a generalizing concept.

Action. A process captured by its representation as being a state of change in an entity or entities over a duration of time.

Entities are products of action. They can also act. Entities can transpose with actions, functionally.

So, in speech, noun (instantiation/concept) can be transposed with verb (instantiate/conceptualize), and verb with noun. Actions can become entities. Entities emerge through action.

Entities and actions are the same thing by virtue of the shared focus of their referring (now instantiating action/instantiated entities, then conceptualizing actions/conceptualized entities). Yet entities and actions are also radically different orientations to reality, the same reality even.

• Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 126-32 [§ markers are cross-references to other sections in this book and the companion volume (AS); footnotes are in this book.]