Ontology Construction and Natural Language

The main thrust of this paper will be to illucidate and promote discussion on the relationship between ontologies and natural language. The value, power, and, I will claim, necessity of basing ontology construction on an understanding of natural language is recognized generally neither within AI nor within formal ontology. This is primarily because of a rather impoverished view of language, of what language is, how it functions, and of what it is doing when it `functions' --- in short, the very role of language for modes of human Being is (again!) being underestimated. Language is misconstrued as an `on the surface of things' technique of building descriptions of the world. This obscures the reasons for using an understanding of language in ontology theory and practise. The paper will briefly set out these reasons, both theoretically and practically --- theoretically, by grounding ontology construction in the understanding of language offered by systemic-functional linguistics and rela..