By the end of the previous series, protolanguage had established a robust, flexible system of unstratified meaning. Signals were recognisable, contrastive, and combinatorial; sequences allowed holistic semantic acts capable of representing absent, hypothetical, or socially negotiated phenomena.
Yet this unstratified system carries a limitation. As the repertoire expands and sequences grow longer, ambiguities multiply, and the system begins to face a combinatorial challenge: how to maintain reliable meaning while allowing expressive flexibility.
The evolutionary solution is differentiation of form and meaning—the first step toward stratified language.
The pressure of combinatorial expansion
In protolanguage, every signal simultaneously carries multiple layers of meaning: affect, reference, social function, and interactional role. This works for small repertoires, but as the number of participants and contexts grows, the system becomes fragile:
-
The same sequence can be interpreted differently depending on context.
-
New combinations risk overloading the perceptual and cognitive capacities of participants.
-
Maintaining coherence requires a way to separate what is meant from how it is realised.
This pressure drives the functional differentiation that eventually becomes lexicogrammar and semantics.
Early tendencies toward lexicogrammatical structure
The first differentiation emerges not as explicit rules but as patterns of regularity in sequences:
-
Certain signals consistently appear together to convey specific relational meanings.
-
Variations in order, repetition, or emphasis begin to encode predictable functions.
-
Participants implicitly track these patterns, stabilising conventions across interactions.
At this stage, we observe incipient lexicogrammar: the system begins to constrain and guide selection of signals according to functional needs, while meaning begins to abstract away from individual signal forms.
Form and meaning begin to diverge
This divergence marks a decisive ontological shift:
-
Meaning: increasingly abstract, relational, and system-dependent.
-
Form: the material signal—vocalisation, gesture, or display—that is selected to realise meaning.
Now, a single meaning can be realised through multiple forms, and a single form can realise multiple meanings depending on context. This separation is the essence of stratification: meaning exists as a structured potential, while forms are the actualisations of that potential.
Preparing the system for semantics
Differentiation of form and meaning enables the next stage: the systematisation of semantic relations.
-
Ideational meaning (representing the world, events, and entities) can be distinguished from interpersonal meaning (relations among participants) and textual organisation (how sequences organise interaction).
-
These proto-semantic distinctions will guide the development of the semantic stratum, setting the stage for Hallidayan stratification.
In relational-ontology terms, the system now supports higher-order potential: not just selecting sequences from a repertoire, but selecting structured constellations of meaning to be realised through forms.
No comments:
Post a Comment