In most contemporary discussions of language and ecology, the ecosocial is treated as an interface — the zone where the material and the semiotic interact. Humans act upon environments, environments influence discourse, and language mediates between them. This picture feels intuitive and humane: it restores materiality to linguistics and embeds meaning within the living world. Yet, for all its good intentions, the interactionist frame retains a silent dualism. It still assumes two orders — the world and language about the world — and seeks to heal the split through contact rather than revision.
Relational ontology makes a sharper move. It does not reconcile the two domains; it dissolves their separation. The ecosocial is not the meeting point of matter and meaning but a single relational potential seen through alternating construals. “The material” and “the semiotic” are not ontological layers but perspectival modes — distinct ways the field folds into itself. What ecology describes as system–environment coupling is, from the relational vantage, a recursive process of construal metabolism: the field nourishing and transforming itself through its own semiotic differentiation.
To make this shift concrete, consider the ordinary phrase language in the environment. The preposition in presupposes containment — an environment that exists prior to the language it holds. But from a relational standpoint, both language and environment are effects of construal. Each presupposes the other’s actualisation. We never find language in an environment; we find environments emerging through language, and language coalescing as the environment’s reflexive expression. The relation is not spatial but ontogenic.
This is not to deny material existence; it is to recognise that materiality itself is a construal category. When a forest becomes a carbon sink, a spiritual sanctuary, or a biodiversity index, these are not alternate descriptions of the same pre-existing entity — they are distinct actualisations of potential, each cutting the relational field along different lines of alignment. The forest as matter and the forest as meaning are inseparable expressions of the same field of possibility.
The interactionist temptation is to imagine two orders influencing one another — discourse shaping behaviour, behaviour altering environment, environment feeding back into discourse. The relational alternative understands these feedbacks as self-reflexive actualisations: each construal not only describes but reconstitutes the potential field. This is what we call construal metabolism — the continuous transformation of relational potential through acts of meaning.
Construal Metabolism and the Dynamics of Potential
Every act of construal consumes and regenerates potential, just as every living organism metabolises energy to sustain itself. But where biological metabolism circulates matter and energy, construal metabolism circulates meaning and relation. It is the ecology of possibility itself. When a community shifts its discourse from development to sustainability, from consumption to care, it is not merely rewording the world — it is altering the metabolic pathways of the ecosocial system, changing how potential flows through social and material configurations.
This reframing illuminates why Halliday’s grammar remains indispensable. His model does not treat language as a passive reflection but as the operating system of social life. Grammar is the architecture through which construal metabolism is coordinated across scales: how meanings circulate, stabilise, and re-enter the field as new conditions of possibility. The material is not external to this process; it is one of the modalities through which construal actualises.
Toward a Relational Ecology of Meaning
When Lemke proposed the notion of ecosocial systems, he gestured toward this unity, but his descriptions — like most ecolinguistic discourse — remained caught in enumeration. To speak of “humans, artefacts, landforms, and species” is to reify outcomes of construal as pre-existing participants. The relational shift replaces the catalogue with a cut: a momentary alignment of potential that brings certain distinctions into focus while letting others recede. The ecosystem, in this light, is not a network of interacting entities but a continuously reconfigured topology of relation — a grammar of being in flux.
Seen this way, “the ecosocial” is simply the field viewed under conditions of reflexivity: potential aware of itself through the semiotic act. Ecology and semiosis are not analogues; they are two scales of the same recursive process. Ecology is semiosis distributed through matter; semiosis is ecology made reflexive.
The Pragmatics of Relational Thinking
This reconstrual is not merely theoretical. It changes what counts as intervention. In an interactionist frame, one aims to correct representations of nature, to speak for the planet or to make language more sustainable. In a relational frame, one works to reconfigure construals, to open alternative alignments through which worlds can co-actualise differently. The task is not to represent reality better but to sustain the conditions for new realities to become possible.
This is what it means to move from interaction to relation: to stop seeking connection between two ontological orders and to begin tracing the recursive patterns through which the field becomes aware of itself as ecology.
The next post will take up this challenge explicitly — turning toward the contemporary field of ecolinguistics, exposing the semiotic fallacies that keep it tethered to representation, and showing how an ecology of construal dissolves the very boundary that ecolinguistics tries to bridge.
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