The Dawn of Metaphor: From Protolanguage to Prehistoric Art: 2 Language, Metaphor, and the Birth of Symbolic Potential

With the stratification of the content plane, language became a system capable of internal reflexivity. The lexicogrammar provided the means to realise semantic potential; semantics, now differentiated from expression, provided the space in which meanings could stand for meanings. Metaphor emerged as the operative mechanism of this reflexivity.

Halliday’s concept of metaphor as “junctional” captures the subtlety of this innovation. In a metaphor, a wording simultaneously realises its congruent meaning — grounded in immediate experience — and a metaphorical meaning, a token standing for a value internal to the semantic system. This token–value relation multiplies the possibilities of meaning: one expression can point beyond itself, folding experience back into the system and opening vast new fields of construal.

Through this mechanism, humans could do something unprecedented: they could map one domain of experience onto another, construe the familiar as unfamiliar, the material as symbolic, and the present as reflective of deeper potentials. Meaning became recursive, and reflexive awareness became semiotically feasible. It is within this stratified, junctional framework that the first symbolic acts of visual art take root.

The earliest cave markings, hand stencils, and abstract motifs are thus extensions of the same junctional principle that underlies linguistic metaphor. A spiral scratched into stone, a bison painted on a wall, or a sand pattern in a ceremonial ground is not merely a representation of something external; it is a token of a value within human construal, a material instantiation of symbolic reflexivity. The handprint is simultaneously gesture, signature, and metaphor — a stand-in for the human agent, their relation to the environment, and the conceptual possibilities of both.

This is why prehistoric art cannot be separated from language. The symbolic field established by stratified content allows the human mind to conceive of the world as patterned, interpretable, and malleable. Art, myth, ritual — all emerge as externalisations of internal metaphoric capacity, the first traces of meaning stepping beyond speech into durable form.

The junctional nature of metaphor thus creates a bridge between internal cognition and external expression. Through metaphorical tokens, experience is transformed into symbolic artefacts. In doing so, early humans did not merely record their world; they performed it, projecting their internal reflexivity onto matter itself. The stratification of language made symbolic culture possible; metaphor made it generative. And in that generativity, the first art of the human world arose.