Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 2 (Open Issue)
Language as Ecological Design: Affordances, Objects, and Posthuman Meaning
Authored By — Takuya Inoue

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive approach to relational ontology by treating language use as a form of ecological design, conceptualized as a process grounded in affordances that arise from interactions among humans, nonhumans, objects, and environments. Prevailing theories of meaning in linguistics and the humanities have relied predominantly on human-centered models of representation, often neglecting materiality, action, and nonhuman agency, and thereby limiting the framework's capacity to account for meaning as a distributed, ecological phenomenon. Drawing on ecological psychology and critical posthumanism, this study develops a relational ontology in which affordances are real possibilities for action, existing independently of human perception or intention. Objects are reconceptualized as stabilized bundles of actualized affordances, realized through affordance actualization, the transition from latent potential to accessible environmental structures. Affordance perceptualization is the process by which signifying practices render specific affordances salient for coordinated action. Meaning is thus understood not as mental representation or symbolic content, but as the configuration of relations that guide perception and action. Within this framework, language is reconceived as a form of perceptual design rather than a medium for transmitting meaning or information. Linguistic constructions selectively foreground certain affordances while constraining others, thereby redistributing agency within ecological fields. Furthermore, a corpus analysis of seven nouns from enTenTen21 (Sketch Engine; approximately 52 billion tokens) demonstrates, through a two-level examination of syntactic and semantic collocational patterns, how lexicogrammatical distributions reflect affordance-type distinctions. Thus, this study contributes to posthuman semantics by offering a transdisciplinary framework for rethinking meaning beyond anthropocentric models.

Keywords

Posthumanism; Affordances; Ecological Psychology; Perceptual Design; Non-Representational Theory.

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