The Ecosystems of Language: Meaning, Matter, and the Metabolism of Construal: Series Overview

Language is not merely a tool for describing the world — it is a living, evolving ecology, a metabolism of meaning that sustains and transforms the social, material, and symbolic landscapes we inhabit. In this six-part series, we trace the arc of language as ecosystem, reflexive field, and planetary nervous system, weaving together Hallidayan systemics, Lemke’s ecosocial insights, and relational ontology.

1. System and Environment: Halliday’s Hidden Ecology

We uncover the latent ecology in Halliday’s theory: system as structured potential, environment as co-actualised condition, and texts as metabolic events that circulate meaning across social and material strata.

2. From Interaction to Relation: Reframing the Ecosocial

Moving beyond interactionist metaphors, we reconceive the ecosocial field as a single relational potential, where language and environment are mutually constitutive through construal metabolism.

3. Against Ecolinguistic Naturalism: The Semiotic Fallacy of Representation

We diagnose the limits of conventional ecolinguistics: its reliance on representation and the “natural” as pre-given. The relational alternative positions construal, not reference, as the ontogenic act that actualises potential.

4. The Ecology of Construal: Meaning as Metabolic Field

Here, meaning itself becomes the medium of ecology: texts, contexts, and systems interact as metabolic processes, circulating potential and sustaining the reflexive field of social and symbolic life.

5. Evolution of Potential: How Language Learns to Evolve

Language evolves not through replication alone but by transforming the very field of possibility. Construals act as evolutionary instruments, aligning, stabilising, and expanding the ecosocial system’s capacity for novel actualisations.

6. The Symbolic Gaia: Language as Planetary Reflexivity

Finally, we scale up to the cosmogenic horizon: language operates as the planet’s reflexive nervous system, coordinating social, material, and symbolic processes, and enabling the co-actualisation of possibility itself.

Together, the series traces the ecosystem of language from latent structure to planetary reflexivity, revealing how meaning, matter, and symbolic evolution are intertwined in a living, self-transforming field.