When Myth Thinks: II. When Meaning Becomes the Source of Meaning

If language transforms experience into meaning and meaning into wording, then something remarkable becomes possible.

Meaning itself can become the source of further meaning-making.

This is the significance of metaphor.

Metaphor is often understood as a decorative feature of language: a vivid way of saying one thing in terms of another. But in systemic functional linguistics it has a more fundamental significance. Metaphor is a reconstrual of meaning.

A meaning that has already been construed from experience becomes the source for another construal.

The distinction is subtle but profound.

In ordinary semantic construal, experience is the source:

experience → meaning

In metaphorical construal, meaning becomes the source:

meaning → reconstrual of meaning

Language can therefore operate not only upon experience, but upon its own meanings.

This is one of the great consequences of stratification. Because meaning and wording are differentiated strata, meanings can be reconstrued through different linguistic resources. Lexical metaphor makes this especially visible, while grammatical metaphor allows the resources of grammar itself to participate in the reconstrual.

The result is an enormous expansion of the semantic potential of language.

A process can be construed as a thing. A relation can become something that can itself be talked about. An experience can acquire a new meaning by being construed through another meaning. And that new meaning can in turn become the source of further construal.

Meaning can therefore become recursive.

This matters for human cognition because it means that we are not restricted to construing what is immediately before us. We can construe our previous construals. We can make meanings of meanings.

Eventually, whole networks of metaphorical meanings can become culturally established and transmitted. The human semantic environment becomes progressively richer than the immediate experience from which it originated.

This is the condition of possibility for symbolism.

A tree can remain a tree while becoming something through which another meaning is construed. A journey can remain a journey while becoming a way of construing a transformation. Light can remain light while becoming a way of construing knowledge, revelation or distinction.

The metaphor does not erase the original meaning. It recruits it.

And this is why metaphor is more than ornament. It is one of the mechanisms by which language continually expands what can be meant.

Once meaning itself can become the source of meaning-making, human beings can inhabit not only a world of experience, but a world of meanings generated from previous meanings.

Mythology will eventually become one of the most powerful cultural forms of this possibility.

But before we turn to myth, there is a more fundamental question:

What happens when a species whose cognition is constituted through language begins to use metaphor to construe the world itself?