“The theme will be, the ecosocial environment: a social community and the various material ecosystems that enable, support, and constrain it (humans, human practices, other species with which humans have co-evolved; buildings, tools, landforms, climate, education, politics, warfare, etc.).” — European SFL Conference, 2026 Call for Papers
When Systemic Functional Linguistics speaks of the ecosocial, it gestures toward a salutary intuition: meaning is not a ghost inside language but a pattern that unfolds within the living, material world. The phrase invites us to think with ecology rather than merely about it: to imagine semiosis as embedded in and responsive to the totality of living arrangements that sustain and constrain expression. And yet, for all its promise, the conventional ecosocial framing often slips back into a mode of cataloguing: species, tools, landforms, politics, education — a list of domains that interact.
This is a small but decisive theoretical concession. To call the ecosocial an environment in which material and semiotic orders meet is to presuppose two orders at the outset, then to ask how they cross one another. Relational ontology takes the opposite tack. It begins by treating the system as theory of its instances: a structured potential whose actualisations are perspectival cuts. From this vantage, the supposed dualism dissolves. The material and the semiotic are not two independently given substances to be stitched together; they are modes of construal within one reflexive field of possibility. The ecosocial, thus, is not a hybrid object but a meta-systemic potential: the relational field that makes distinctions — and therefore things — possible.
This post develops that reconstrual in three linked moves. First, we restate Halliday’s grammar of instantiation as an account of potential and perspectival cut — and insist on the terminological discipline we owe to his stratification. Second, we re-read Lemke’s ecosocial project through the language of relational cuts, showing how Lemke gestures toward the right intuition but remains prone to the catalogue. Third, we sketch the methodological and political consequences of treating the ecosocial as an ecology of construal: for analysis, for praxis, and for the rhetorical politics of SFL itself.
1. System, Instantiation, and the Perspectival Cut
Halliday’s cline of instantiation specifies a metaphysics of potentiality. A system is not merely a set of choices; it is a theory of the instance — a schema for what might be. Instantiation is not a temporal process but a perspectival actualisation: a cut through potential that produces the event, the text, the artefact. When we speak of the ecosystem in ordinary ecological science, we already presuppose some cut: the boundaries of the system, the objects within it, the processes to be measured. Halliday asks us to see that those boundaries and objects are themselves contingent on how we construe the field.
This terminological insistence matters because it preserves conceptual clarity when we move from linguistic structure to social-material process. If context is treated as a stratum that is realised by semantics and lexicogrammar — as Halliday insists — then the analyst’s job is to explicate how construals map across strata, not to import an external ontology to do the mapping for them. In other words: keep the Hallidayan stratification; treat field, tenor, and mode as context variables that semantics realises. Do not collapse context into register, nor treat register variables as autonomous metaphysical ingredients. These are not hair-splitting disciplinary moves. They are safeguards against smuggling in an illicit dualism when we try to think ecology and meaning together.
Take, for example, a coastal community’s discourse about a shoreline. One construal (a fisher’s tale) produces entities such as eddies, nets, and seasons; another construal (a municipal policy brief) produces zonal boundaries, risk categories, and economic metrics. Both are cuts through the same living field; both are actualisations of its potential. The ecosocial question is not which of these accounts is more real; it is how different construals align, conflict, and co-actualise the shared relational potential.
2. Rereading Lemke: From Catalogue to Cut
Lemke’s work in the 1990s was an important and generous attempt to widen SFL’s aperture, to let in the non-human and the material. He wanted to take semiosis off the page and situate it in the life of environments. The danger, however, lies in translating that generosity into enumeration. The list of humans, species, artefacts, landforms, politics reads — at first glance — as an inclusive ontology. But inclusion can be a conservative move if the underlying metaphysics remains interactionist: things still exist prior to their relations; they only then come into connection.
Relational ontology rephrases Lemke’s insight as follows: the ecosocial is not a set of items in relation but a pattern of possibility whose actualisations give rise to items. In practice, this means shifting our descriptive posture. Instead of asking how language interacts with climate or with buildings, we ask how particular construals of the field bring into being the very categories — climate, building, language — we then use to theorise interaction. This is a subtle inversion but an analytically explosive one. It frees us from treating the material as background to discourse and instead treats both the material and the discursive as co‑actualising modes of a shared potential.
Consider landforms. In an interactionist register, land is a stage on which human activity plays out; it exists prior to discourse, and discourse interprets it. From a relational cut, landforms themselves are construals: ways of folding geological, colonial, economic, and aesthetic potentials into stable references. The moment we call a dune a dune — or a sacred hill — we have actualised a particular history of construal. Land is therefore as semantically charged as any clause. The paradox is not that meaning is ‘in’ the land but that the land is a way of making meaning out of the field’s potentials.
3. Methodological Consequences: Analysis as Construal Tracking
If the ecosocial is an ecology of construal, then method must follow. We propose three methodological corollaries.
a. Construal tracking. Analysts should trace sequences of cuts: how different actors and institutions actualise distinct construals of a shared field, and how those cuts align or misalign. This requires more than coding entities; it requires mapping the perspectives that produce categories.
b. Cross‑stratal resonance. Since construals manifest across strata, analysis must show how field-tenor-mode alignments cohere trans-stratally. For instance: how do a municipal zoning plan (semantics + register) and a fisher’s embodied practice (material + tenor) co-actualise different yet overlapping possibilities for the shoreline?
c. Reflexive historiography. Any ecosocial analysis must historicise construals: which cuts have been stabilised through power, habit, or technology? We must ask: whose construals have been institutionalised as the default, and which remain marginal? This amplifies SFL’s long-standing concern for ideology and power but redirects it toward the mechanics of cut‑stabilisation.
These methods are compatible with empirical work already flourishing in SFL and social semiotics (ethnography, multimodal corpus analysis, participatory action research). They differ, however, in what they take as explananda: not merely the presence of semiotic forms within environments, but the formation of the categories that make such analyses possible.
4. Political Stakes: Who Gets To Cut?
Relational ontology does not dissolve politics; it sharpens it. If construals actualise possibility, then the power to stabilise certain cuts is the power to make particular worlds persistent. Colonial cadasters, industrial risk assessments, and regulatory categories are not neutral descriptions; they are durable cuts that enable particular economic and administrative practices while marginalising others. Treating the ecosocial as a reflexive field makes visible how categories naturalise interests.
Consequently, scholarship must be interventionist in a particular sense: it must reveal how alternative construals could be enacted and made durable. This is not a naïve technopolitics of deciding which perspective is correct; it is a practice of pluralising the field — demonstrating that different ways of cutting could actualise different sets of relations and therefore different ethical possibilities.
5. A Modest Program for SFL: Moves Forward
If we accept the ecosocial as an ecology of construal, then SFL’s next steps are conceptually modest but practically radical. Here are five interlocking moves the community might take.
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Terminological rigour. Maintain Halliday’s stratification and insist on ‘actualise’ for instantiation. Keep field, tenor, mode, and register distinct in analysis.
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Construal lexica. Develop analytic tools and lexica that name common cuts — e.g., market‑cut, sacred‑cut, infrastructural‑cut — so we can talk precisely about patterns of actualisation across contexts.
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Multimodal provenance. Integrate data that capture material practice (sensor logs, ethnographic observation, architectural plans) alongside discourse to map cross‑stratal resonances.
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Critical interventions. Collaborate with communities to surface alternative construals and test how they reconfigure institutional practice — a pragmatic SFL activism that respects reflexivity.
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Meta‑theoretical dialogue. Engage with neighbouring traditions (actor–network thinking, feminist new materialisms) not to import their metaphysics but to compare how they describe cuts and stabilisations. The point is comparative transparency, not assimilation.
6. Closing: The Conference as a Field Replying to a Field
The ecosocial theme invites us to be more ambitious and more disciplined simultaneously — to maintain Halliday’s analytic rigour while widening the object of inquiry to include the political, the technological, and the non‑human.
In short: let us treat the ecosocial not as another thing to add to our lists but as a call to reconceive the very act of naming. An ecology of construal reorients SFL from a grammar of texts to a grammar of worlds — and that, finally, is the theoretical coup the ecosocial promised from the start.
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