Ecolinguistics has long sought to reconnect language and life — to show that words matter because they shape how we inhabit the Earth. It urges us to attend to the discourses that normalise extraction, to the metaphors that conceal violence, to the stories that sustain or erode ecological care. In this, it performs a vital ethical labour. Yet beneath its moral urgency lies a stubborn metaphysical inheritance: the belief that language represents the world.
This is the semiotic fallacy of representation — the assumption that there exists a world “out there” whose condition can be more or less faithfully mirrored in language. Ecolinguistics then takes as its mission to repair that mirroring, to correct the distortion, to make discourse more truthful, transparent, or sustainable. But in doing so, it reinstates the very division it seeks to overcome: a nature to be spoken for, and a language that speaks about it.
The Double Bind of Representation
This division traps ecolinguistics in a double bind. If it claims that language distorts reality, it concedes that reality lies beyond language. But if it claims that language constitutes reality, it risks the opposite solipsism — that nothing exists beyond discourse. The discipline oscillates endlessly between these poles: realism and constructivism, objectivity and interpretation, materiality and meaning. The debate persists only because both sides presuppose the same cut — between language and world.
Relational ontology dissolves the bind by removing the representational premise. Language does not re-present reality; it is one of the modalities through which reality actualises itself. There is no pre-linguistic world awaiting description, nor a purely linguistic world detached from matter. There is only the field of relational potential, within which certain construals stabilise as what we call “material,” others as what we call “semiotic.” These are not ontological layers but metabolic states of the same field.
Construal as Ontogenic Force
To construe is not to depict but to differentiate potential. Every linguistic act is an ontogenic operation: it performs a cut through the field, articulating certain relations as foreground, others as background. What ecolinguistics mistakes for reference — language pointing to the world — is better understood as alignment: language positioning the field relative to itself.
Consider a sentence like the reef is dying. The phrase appears representational, as if describing a state of affairs external to itself. But in the relational view, it actualises a configuration in which “reef,” “life,” and “death” acquire determinate value. It does not report a fact but enact a cut: a construal that brings an ecology of meaning into being. That cut may align with certain sensory, scientific, or affective experiences, but these are all modalities of the same reflexive field — not separate realities being bridged.
This is why the corrective impulse of ecolinguistics — to make our metaphors “more accurate” — is misplaced. Accuracy presupposes an independent measure; relation has none. What matters is not correspondence but reflexive coherence: the capacity of a construal to sustain viable alignments within the relational field.
The Illusion of the ‘Natural’
A second symptom of ecolinguistic naturalism is its uncritical invocation of the natural as a normative horizon. “Nature” becomes the benchmark of right relation, the ground of authenticity. But this too is a construal — a historically sedimented configuration through which human collectives have sought to stabilise their place in the cosmos. To appeal to the natural as pre-discursive truth is to smuggle transcendence back into a relational universe.
From a relational standpoint, nature is not an external domain but a construal that foregrounds the continuity of the field over its differentiations. It is one possible alignment among many — a vital one, but no more primordial than the technical, the social, or the symbolic. The ecological crisis, then, is not the violation of a natural order but a pathological construal metabolism: the over-actualisation of certain cuts (extraction, control, scarcity) at the expense of others (mutuality, interdependence, reflexivity).
From Correction to Reconfiguration
Ecolinguistics often measures progress by its capacity to expose and correct “damaging discourses.” But exposure, in the representational frame, only ever reaffirms the primacy of representation. It implies that the world remains intact beneath the distortions of language, waiting to be spoken rightly. A relational approach shifts the task entirely. The goal is not to correct descriptions but to reconfigure construals — to generate new ways of cutting the field so that alternative alignments of potential can emerge.
This is not the politics of truth but the ecology of possibility. It asks not whether our words are accurate, but whether they expand or constrict the relational field. The ethical imperative is not fidelity to a pre-existing reality but care for the conditions through which realities may co-actualise.
The Semiotic Turn Reversed
In this light, the relational view performs a kind of reversal of the semiotic turn. Where the semiotic turn brought everything into language, the relational turn brings language back into everything — not as dominion but as mode of being. Meaning is not an overlay on the real; it is the real in its reflexive phase.
Thus, the semiotic fallacy of representation is more than an epistemological error; it is an ontological misstep that fragments the field into mirror images of itself. To move beyond it is not to declare that “everything is discourse,” but that everything is construal — and construal is always the field folding upon itself in the act of becoming aware.
The next post will extend this argument from critique to reconstruction: Part 4 — “The Ecology of Construal: Meaning as Metabolic Field.” Here we will model how construal functions as the fundamental ecological process, integrating Hallidayan systemics with relational ontology to propose a grammar of possibility.
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