Preface: Toward Contingent Construal
In earlier series, we explored how the activity of individual organisms becomes coordinated within a social system — first through value-guided behaviour, then through routinised symbolic acts. We saw how a foraging bee’s perceptual categorisation can contribute to the colony’s viability, and how, through structured enactment, a behaviour like the waggle dance can come to stand for something absent.
Now we shift focus. Rather than symbolic acts that stabilise over time, we ask: when does a semiotic behaviour become dynamically contingent? When do organisms begin to shape meaning in the moment — modulating their actions not just in response to the world, but in response to one another, in ways that cannot be pre-specified?
To approach this question, we draw on Halliday’s notion of microfunctions — early communicative functions loosely glossed as regulating, requesting, interacting, and expressing. These are not tied to human grammar, nor to language as such. Instead, they offer a lens through which we can explore how contingent meaning-making might emerge in other species — where behavioural flexibility, role-switching, and social dependency create pressure for interactional alignment beyond routine.
This is not yet the story of language. It is the story of how meaning begins to move — not only as a stable form, but as a socially negotiated act.
1 When Routine Is Not Enough
A routinised semiotic system can be remarkably effective. The waggle dance of the honeybee enables one individual’s foraging experience to shape the behaviour of others — through a patterned, interpretable performance that has stabilised across generations. It is not improvised or invented; it is enacted. Its success lies in its reliability.
But not all social environments support this kind of stability. In species where individuals form fluid associations, where roles shift, alliances form and dissolve, or threats emerge unpredictably, routinised behaviours can fall short. In such settings, organisms must respond not just to general patterns, but to specific configurations of others, here and now. And sometimes, what matters must be made to matter — to another individual, in the moment.
This is the threshold where contingent construal becomes adaptive. Rather than enacting a fixed mapping, the individual must shape a construal that suits the situation — not as a private mental act, but as a public semiotic performance: a gesture, a call, a posture, a pattern of movement that modulates how another individual perceives and responds.
The evolutionary pressures that give rise to such systems are not mysterious. They appear where:
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individuals must coordinate in ways that cannot be routinised,
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social outcomes depend on negotiated interaction,
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and organisms benefit from the ability to influence others’ behaviour flexibly.
Here, the emergence of microfunctions becomes plausible — not as fully formed linguistic roles, but as interactional tendencies grounded in value-based need. A demand for food, a move to regulate another’s behaviour, a call to interact, or a gesture of personal stance — these are not arbitrary categories. They are ways of acting with and on others, shaped by the pressures of contingent social life.
To trace this emergence, we need not imagine a leap from signal to syntax. We begin instead with what a flexible, socially situated organism must do: regulate others, seek assistance, express internal state, establish mutual orientation. These are functions of construal, enacted in real time, not yet grammatical, but already semiotic.
What emerges is not a fixed code, but a field of patterned responsiveness — constrained not by convention alone, but by the dynamics of shared embodiment, mutual relevance, and ongoing coordination. Where routine ends, contingent construal begins.
2 Microfunctions as Pressures on Meaning
If a behaviour is to be shaped in the moment, it must be shaped for someone. Meaning does not emerge in a vacuum. It arises under pressure — from needs that cannot be met alone, from actions that must be coordinated, from relations that must be navigated in real time. These pressures are not linguistic, but social. And they can be grouped, not arbitrarily, but functionally.
Michael Halliday, observing the earliest forms of communication in young children, identified several microfunctions — basic purposes that communicative acts serve before the development of grammar. These included the instrumental (I want), regulatory (Do as I say), interactional (Me and you), and personal (Here I come). While drawn from human ontogeny, these functions do not require language to exist. They point to something more general: core functions of contingent social coordination.
We can treat these not as stages of development, but as functional attractors: tendencies that emerge wherever social systems require individuals to modulate one another’s behaviour in context-sensitive ways. In this light, the microfunctions become pressures on meaning — each a kind of problem that contingent construal helps to solve.
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The instrumental function emerges when one organism seeks to access something through another — not just through effort, but through influence.
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The regulatory function appears when one organism attempts to constrain or redirect another’s behaviour.
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The interactional function supports affiliation — establishing, maintaining, or repairing social bonds in situations of mutual presence.
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The personal function allows an organism to project internal state or orientation — making stances visible that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
These are not speculative abstractions. They are grounded in the concrete needs of social coordination, especially in species where roles are flexible, cooperation is non-obligatory, or outcomes depend on subtle alignment. And they help explain why some communicative systems move beyond routine — because routine cannot satisfy these pressures on its own.
Each microfunction creates a semiotic demand: for a behaviour that is shaped with respect to another’s response. This demand introduces variability — not random, but constrained by value, embodiment, and the history of interaction. The result is a space of emergent construals — not yet language, but no longer mere behaviour.
What we begin to see is a shift from stability to adaptability, from fixed mappings to situated modulation. And in this shift, the groundwork is laid for systems that are both contingent and semiotic — systems in which what is done constrains what is meant.
3 Contingency and Feedback
A construal only succeeds if it makes a difference. This does not mean it must be understood in the abstract. It means it must shape another’s behaviour in a way that aligns with the constraints under which it was produced. In a system where routine is not enough, contingent construal must be taken up — acted on, replied to, reinforced, or resisted.
This introduces a new kind of feedback loop. In routinised systems like the waggle dance, alignment is achieved through stable form: shared structure leads to predictable uptake. But in systems of contingent construal, alignment is not guaranteed. It is negotiated in real time — through interactional feedback, where one organism's construal modulates another's behaviour, and that behaviour in turn reshapes the field of construal.
This loop is not metacognitive. It does not require awareness, representation, or symbolic intention. It requires only that:
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construals are sensitive to the presence of others,
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responses are shaped by the form of the construal, and
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further construals are modulated by the outcome of that interaction.
In such a system, forms can begin to stabilise — not into fixed codes, but into attractors of behaviour. A gesture that succeeds in regulating another’s action becomes more likely to be repeated. A vocalisation that brings social contact may come to index affiliation. A display that fails to produce its intended alignment may be abandoned, reshaped, or withheld.
This process is not learning in the usual sense. It is interactionally entrained variation: a system in which constrained novelty is reinforced or eroded by its consequences for coordination. In this context, microfunctions become not just pressures, but fields of selection: zones of social tension in which only certain construals succeed.
The result is a semiotic ecology — not a symbolic code, but a space of mutually shaped responsiveness, in which behaviour and construal co-evolve. Meanings are not transmitted, but enacted and taken up. And through this ongoing loop of production, response, and adjustment, contingent semiotic systems begin to take form.
What emerges is a dynamic repertoire: forms that are shaped in the moment, yet constrained by prior patterns of success; meanings that are not fixed, but functionally sufficient; and social alignments that depend not on fixed roles, but on shared participation in an unfolding field of relevance.
This is the groundwork of flexible meaning. Not yet grammar, not yet language — but already a system in which construal becomes something more than behaviour: an act shaped with regard to another’s uptake.
4 From Contingency to Differentiation
Contingent construal begins as situated response. A gesture, a vocalisation, a shift in posture — shaped by context, directed at another, modulated by immediate relevance. But over time, certain forms begin to settle. They succeed, not because they are fixed, but because they are flexible in the right ways — interpretable across contexts, adaptable in deployment, recognisable in uptake.
This is the beginning of differentiation. What starts as fluid variation begins to partition. One form tends to occur in acts of demand; another in acts of regulation; another in affiliative exchanges. These patterns are not arbitrary. They are shaped by the functional pressures that gave rise to the microfunctions themselves — pressures for influence, coordination, and alignment.
As forms differentiate, they also generalise. A gesture that once regulated access to food may come to regulate movement, turn-taking, or distance. A sound that once solicited help may be extended to other forms of request. What matters is not the original association, but the functional relation between construal and consequence.
Differentiation and generalisation are not stages. They are dynamics within a constrained system. They mark a shift from meaning-in-the-moment to repertoires of patterned construal — structured enough to support interpretation, flexible enough to adapt to new interactional demands.
Crucially, these repertoires remain semiotic, not symbolic in the linguistic sense. They do not rely on syntax or explicit reference. But they do exhibit:
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Functional differentiation: different forms associated with different kinds of semiotic work.
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Contextual flexibility: capacity to be reshaped, redirected, or recombined across situations.
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Interactive uptake: responses shaped not just by form, but by recognised function.
At this point, the system begins to support alignment across difference. Individuals need not share the same experience or role. They need only share a history of mutual constraint — a social ecology in which construal and interpretation co-evolve.
This is not the emergence of language. But it is a major step toward it. A semiotic system has formed in which meanings are not only enacted, but differentiated by use — where the form of a construal tells us not what something is, but what kind of act it is doing in the social field.
What began as a gesture becomes an act of stance. What began as a sound becomes an act of regulation. Meaning is no longer emergent with every act; it is now enacted through a system — a system shaped by the pressures of social life, constrained by embodiment, and grounded in the shared activity of response.
Epilogue: A System Poised for Symbolic Form
We began with a question: when does routine fall short? From there, we traced a path through the emergence of contingent construal — behaviour shaped not only by internal value, but by the need to coordinate flexibly with others. Along this path, we encountered functional pressures: to influence, to align, to connect, to assert. These became sites of meaning — not as representations, but as acts that made a difference in real time.
Through interactional feedback, these acts stabilised. Not into fixed codes, but into structured tendencies — repertoires of form shaped by what they tended to do. Over time, these tendencies differentiated: one form for regulation, another for demand, another for stance. They began to generalise: from specific acts to functional classes, from immediate context to broader interactional fields.
This is not yet language. But it is no longer merely behaviour. It is a semiotic system: contingent, embodied, responsive, and functionally differentiated. Meaning here is not fixed, but it is systemic — shaped by histories of interaction, by the pressures of social life, and by the affordances of a shared ecology.
From here, many paths are possible. A system like this might remain fluid, ephemeral, deeply embedded in immediate context. Or it might, under further pressure, begin to stabilise new kinds of structure: patterned combinations, more abstract construals, forms whose meaning depends on their relation to others.
But those are questions for another time.
For now, we have traced how, from the basic pressures of value-guided coordination, a system can emerge in which construal becomes flexible, form becomes differentiated, and meaning becomes collective — not because of words, but because of what it takes to live, act, and align with others when routine is not enough.