If meaning is a metabolism, then it also evolves. But not in the Darwinian sense of replication and selection alone — language evolves as collective actualisation of potential, continuously reshaping the relational field that sustains it. Evolution here is reflexive: it is the field observing and reconfiguring its own possibilities through construal.
From Biological to Symbolic Evolution
Biology provides a convenient analogy: genes circulate, organisms act, ecosystems adapt. But language does something more radical: it allows the potential for evolution itself to evolve. Each construal carries memory of past actualisations, stabilises certain relations, and opens space for new alignments. Words, structures, and texts are not merely tools for survival; they are instruments for reconfiguring what counts as viable within the ecosocial system.
Halliday’s triad — system, instance, and instantiation — gains a new significance in this light. The system is the pool of potential, the instance is the temporary crystallisation, and the instantiation is the metabolic event through which the system adapts. Each actualisation is simultaneously an experiment in survival and a reconfiguration of possibility itself. Language, in other words, learns as it lives.
Construal as Evolutionary Engine
Every act of construal is an evolutionary act. Consider a community developing new terms for climate resilience: these are not labels applied to pre-existing phenomena but cuts through potential that stabilise new relational configurations. The vocabulary, grammar, and discourse conventions emerge as evolutionary instruments: they extend the field’s capacity to support novel practices, align collective attention, and redistribute energy across socio-material networks.
Unlike natural selection, which is blind to meaning, this evolution is reflexive. Language observes its own consequences: metaphors that fail, discourses that marginalise, narratives that destabilise — all feed back into the metabolism of potential. The ecosocial system, in this sense, is learning through language, adapting not only to external pressures but to the history of its own semiotic choices.
Potential and Actualisation: The Pulse of the System
The evolution of language is marked by the ongoing tension between potential and actualisation. Every construal actualises a subset of possibilities, which then reshapes the system’s next round of potential. This dynamic produces both continuity and novelty: some patterns are conserved, others mutate. It is a metabolism in motion, a pulse of the relational field itself.
Importantly, this evolution is multi-scalar. Small acts of construal — a sentence, a gesture, a new term — ripple through communities, institutions, and material networks, reconfiguring patterns at every level. Large-scale cultural shifts — the adoption of digital communication, the revaluation of ecological metaphors, or the creation of symbolic infrastructures — are themselves emergent outcomes of countless construals operating in concert.
Language as the Nervous System of Possibility
From a cosmogenic perspective, the evolution of language is the evolution of possibility itself. The semiotic metabolism of the ecosocial field allows the collective system to anticipate, adapt, and transform. Language is not simply a medium; it is the nervous system of the field, coordinating the growth, differentiation, and alignment of potential across time and scale.
This insight sets the stage for a radical synthesis: the ecosocial system is a symbolic ecology, and the evolution of language within it is the mechanism through which the cosmos itself — social, material, and symbolic — experiments with its own becoming.
The next and final post of this series, Part 6 — “The Symbolic Gaia: Language as Planetary Reflexivity,” will extend this argument to the cosmogenic horizon, showing how language acts as a reflexive nervous system of planetary and symbolic alignment, connecting relational ontology, SFL, and the becoming of possibility itself.
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