Ecologies of Possible Meaning: Semiosis through a Relational Ontology: 4 Semiotic Ecologies: How Meaning Potentials Emerge and Evolve

If an ecology of practice is the patterned social-historical field from which construal draws its potentials, then a semiotic ecology is the patterned meaning field that emerges from those activations. This is not a separate domain; it is the same ecology viewed from the vantage point of semiosis itself.

Where ecologies of practice stabilise ways of doing, semiotic ecologies stabilise ways of meaning.

But crucially — nothing here is representational. A semiotic ecology is not a map, a code, or a system stored somewhere. It is the relational organisation of potentials for meaning, sedimented through repeated ecological activation.

1. Meaning Potentials as Emergent Patterns, not Stored Units

Halliday’s idea of language as a resource for meaning-making becomes sharper here: the “resource” is not a warehouse of meanings but a stabilised ecology of potentials. These potentials are:

• patterned through past construals,

• distributed across a community,

• available for activation in future construals.

Meaning potential is emergent, not stored; relational, not representational; ecological, not cognitive.

This allows us to keep Halliday’s architecture while interpreting its metaphors through relational ontology rather than cognitive or structuralist assumptions.

2. Construal Leaves Traces — How Semiotic Ecologies Evolve

Every act of construal slightly reshapes the ecology.

Not because individuals “affect a system”, but because the ecology is the sedimented pattern of construals.

Each construal activates certain potentials and not others. Over time, these repeated activations generate:

• dominant pathways of meaning,

• marginalised alternatives,

• new uptakes and recombinations,

• emergent patterns that become taken-for-granted.

This is semiosis as ecological evolution — not a biological metaphor, but a relational dynamic: patterns of activation become potentials for future activation.

3. Personal Meaning and Collective Meaning Share the Same Ecology

There is no individual meaning system and no collective meaning system. There is only:

• one ecology of meaning potentials,

• various perspectival cuts through it,

• some cuts stabilised through shared activation,

• others fleeting, idiosyncratic, or precluded.

“Individual meaning” is the activation of potentials that a person can access.

“Collective meaning” is the pattern of potentials repeatedly activated across individuals.

Both are activated from the same semiotic ecology but at different points along the individuation cline.

This aligns with your model of individuation and avoids all imported holism or cognitivism.

4. Circulation of Meaning Without Representational Transfer

Meaning does not travel between people; activation spreads because the ecology is shared.

When one person construes something, they activate a pathway that others can activate as well. Not because a meaning was transmitted, but because the pathway is:

• available,

• familiar,

• normatively sanctioned,

• ecologically stabilised.

Thus communication is not transfer; it is co-activation of a semiotic ecology.

This is the relational alternative to both transmission models and idealist models of shared meaning.

5. Reinterpreting Halliday’s Metafunctions Ecologically

Halliday’s metafunctions can be rethought ecologically — not as fixed subsystems, but as recurring ecological-organisational patterns of meaning potential:

• Ideational: potentials for construing experience.

• Interpersonal: potentials for enacting relations.

• Textual: potentials for orchestrating semiotic flow.

In ecological terms, metafunctions are modes of ecological patterning that repeatedly emerge in semiosis. They are not mental faculties or stored modules; they are recurrent patterns actualised through construal in particular ecologies of practice.

This keeps Halliday intact while recasting his model in relational terms.

6. Why This Matters for an Ecosocial Theory of Semiosis

By shifting to semiotic ecologies, we gain:

• a non-representational account of meaning,

• a non-cognitivist account of context,

• a relational account of how meanings persist and change,

• a way to articulate meaning evolution without reifying “language as system”,

• a natural bridge to your relational ontology’s treatment of events, cuts, and potential.

And we prepare the ground for the next move: exploring ecological individuation — how individuals arise as points of access to the semiotic ecology, rather than containers of meaning.