Long before the first bison appeared on a cave wall, long before a hand pressed ochre against stone, there were sounds — patterned, expressive, relational. Our ancestors had a protolanguage: a semiotic system with a content plane and an expression plane, like many species do today. Its meanings were immediate, tied to context and behaviour, inseparable from the act of doing. But something happened that changed everything — not a biological leap, but a semiotic one.
What made Homo into Homo sapiens was not the invention of communication, but the stratification of the content plane. With language, the content plane split into two strata — semantics and lexicogrammar. This internal differentiation created a new kind of reflexivity: meanings could now be construed as other meanings. Halliday called metaphor a “junctional” phenomenon, because a wording realises both its congruent and metaphorical meaning — a token standing for a value within the semantic system itself. In that moment, a token–value relation was born inside meaning.
Metaphor thus marks the evolutionary threshold of meaning standing for meaning. The congruent meaning — direct, experiential — becomes the value, while the metaphorical meaning — re-worded, re-construed — becomes the token. This reflexive architecture allowed language to expand itself from within, proliferating new modes of thought, new symbolic densities.
This is the semiotic architecture that made art possible — not as imitation of the world, but as reflexive construal of experience. The handprint, the animal, the spiral — these are not depictions; they are metaphorical tokens standing for values of shared experience. They externalise a reflexivity that was first born in language.
The stratification of meaning is thus the condition of possibility for symbolic life itself — for art, myth, and ultimately, consciousness. Prehistoric art is not the origin of symbolism; it is its flowering — the moment metaphor finds its first canvas.
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