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?

When Myth Thinks: I. When Language Creates a World

We usually think of language as something human beings use. We have experiences, form thoughts about them, and then use language to communicate what we have already thought. From this perspective, language is an instrument of cognition.

Systemic Functional Linguistics reverses that perspective.

As Halliday puts it, language is used to make sense of experience and to enact our interactions with other people. Its grammar therefore has to interface with both experience and social processes. But it must also organise their construal as meaning and transform that meaning into wording. Human language does this through the stratification of its content plane: semantics and lexicogrammar are distinct strata, related so that meaning can be realised as wording.

This distinction is fundamental. Other semiotic systems have meaning, but language has wording: a lexicogrammatical stratum systematically related to a semantic stratum. The relation between the two enormously expands the possibilities of meaning-making.

Halliday goes so far as to say that this development was of immense significance in human evolution: it “created the modern human brain.”

The claim is not that other organisms lack cognition. It is that language created a specifically human mode of cognition: experience could become meaning, and meaning could become wording. Once meaning could be expressed in wording, it could also be preserved, shared, compared, elaborated and reconstrued.

This gives us a different way of thinking about human thought.

Language does not merely give us names for a world that is already fully available to cognition. It provides resources through which a world can become construable as meaning.

And this has a remarkable consequence.

If language creates a distinctive human capacity to construe experience as meaning, then language can also construe the conditions of that very capacity. Human beings can use language to construe themselves, their world, their relations with one another, and the activity of meaning-making itself.

Mythology becomes especially interesting at this point.

A myth is not simply an explanation of a world that exists independently of language. It is a linguistic construal of a world. Its figures, events and relations are meanings organised through language and transmitted through a culture.

Genesis offers an especially striking example. Its creation narrative does not simply represent a sequence of material events. Again and again, creation is represented as something spoken:

God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light.

The material world is thus represented as the projection of a verbal process.

We should not infer that the authors possessed a theory of language, cognition or semiotics resembling Halliday's. We are concerned here with what the surviving text makes possible as a construal, not with reconstructing the authors' intentions or knowledge.

The question, then, is not whether Genesis secretly contains modern linguistics.

It is more interesting than that:

What might it mean for a mythology to represent the world itself as emerging through saying?

Perhaps the answer begins with a simple possibility:

Genesis may be mythologising the human discovery that experience becomes a world for us through language.