Frye may not have, as Trevor Losh‑Johnson reports someone as saying, an “etiological theory of linguistics,” if that means a theory of the origin or causes of language, but he does have a theory of language––in fact, several theories.  He begins his talk “The Expanding World of Metaphor” by saying:

Let us start with literature, and with the fact that literature is an art of words.  That means, in the first place, a difference of emphasis between the art and the words.  If we choose the emphasis on words, we soon begin to relate the verbal structures we call literary to other verbal structures.  We find that there are no clearly marked boundaries, only centres of interest.  There are many writers, ranging from Plato to Sartre, whom it is difficult, or more accurately unnecessary, to classify as literary or philosophical.  Gradually more and more boundaries dissolve, including the boundary between creators and critics, as every criticism is also a recreation.  Sooner or later, in pursuing this direction of study, literary criticism, philosophy, and most of the social sciences come to converge on the study of language itself.  The characteristics of language are clearly the essential clue to the nature of everything built out of language.(“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1976–1991, CW 18, 342–3)

The “characteristics of language” are naturally a part of Frye’s theory of language, the two chief forms of which in his late work are in the first chapters of The Great Code (phases of language) and Words with Power (modes of language).  The first chapter of The Great Code, in typical Frye fashion, is elaborately schematic.  It begins with Vico’s notion of the three ages of humanity, and then moves through more than a dozen different categories to classify the tripartite phases that language has, more or less historically, passed through: the poetic, the heroic, and the vulgar; the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic; the mythical, the allegorical, and the descriptive; the metaphorical, the metonymic, and the similic, and so on.  Frye glances at the historical locus of each of these phases, the way each formulates subject‑object relations, the meaning of such words as “God” and “Logos” in each, and the typical form that prose takes in each phase.  All of this anatomizing, devoid of Frye’s examples and illustrations, can be summarized in this chart:

Phases of Language: The Great Code, chapter 1

The problem Frye faces in applying his schematic account of language is that the Bible does not fit well into one or more of the phases.  His way out is to devise another framework to account for the Bible’s metaphorical origins and its “concerned” or existential quality.  Thus, he posits a fourth form of expression that is a special kind of rhetoric: kerygma.  The three phases of language more or less disappear in Frye’s subsequent writing, and except for the metaphoric phase Frye does little with the three phases in the other chapters of The Great Code.  But kerygma does not disappear. 

Frye was apparently dissatisfied with this account of language in The Great Code.  In Words with Power, in any case, he takes a somewhat different approach, developing a thesis about four modes of verbal communication: the descriptive, the dialectical, the ideological, and the imaginative.  Each mode is connected to its successor by what Frye calls “the excluded initiative,” “initiative” meaning the motive necessary to get the verbal process going and “excluded” referring to what remains in the background in one mode as an unexamined assumption but which comes to the foreground in the succeeding mode.  Frye replaces the tripartite analysis of The Great Code with a quadripartite one, represented in this chart.

Modes of Language: Words with Power, chapter 1

In Frye’s new formulation the function of the descriptive or information-centered mode of writing is to transmit the nonverbal.  The descriptive mode minimizes tropes; its criterion is truth; its typical narrative forms are histories, textbooks, and reference works.  Its excluded initiative is syntax, the word-ordering process.  That is, our attention as readers is directed away from the word-ordering process because in the descriptive mode language is assumed to be a transparent vehicle of communication: nature is the content reflected by language.  Frye also refers to the descriptive mode as “perceptual” because descriptive language reflects what we see in nature.  When the descriptive initiative is no longer excluded, it becomes the shaping force of the next mode, the dialectical or conceptual, which functions to coordinate verbal elements.  This is the mode of metaphysical systems, the mode in which data are arranged and arguments constructed and in which nature is the content not reflected but contained by language.  The excluded initiative in this mode –– what begins the process of objective conceptual prose but which is not the focus –– is subjective energy or desire.  Again, when subjective energy does become the focus, the writer and what is written become identified, and we enter the ideological or rhetorical mode.  Dialectic is incorporated into rhetoric in order to rationalize authority.  The excluded initiative in this mode is what Frye calls “the non-human personal,” a somewhat curious locution for the numinous or the divine: the personal non-human world is the world of the gods.  Finally, once this initiative is no longer excluded, we enter the mythological mode, the mode where the fundamental element is no longer descriptive truth or conceptual argument or persuasion in the interest of ideology but the conceivable.  This is the poetic and metaphorical mode of the imagination.  Myth, in short, is the excluded initiative of ideology.  In this four-part sequence of linguistic modes, where the emergence of the previously excluded initiative represents the Hegelian Aufhebung, we can see the close connection in Frye’s thinking between the religious initiative and the fundamental principles of literature: metaphor and myth.  This is one of the ways Frye puts it:

Myth takes us back to a time when the distinction between subject and object was much less continuous and rigid than it is now, and gods are the central characters of myth because they are usually personalities identified with aspects of nature.  They are therefore built-in metaphors. . . . There is an infinite number of individual myths, but only a finite number––in fact a very small number of species of myths.  These latter express the human bewilderment of why we are here and where we are going, and include the myths of creation, of fall, of exodus and migration, of the destruction of the human race in the past (deluge myths) or the future (apocalyptic myths), of redemption in some phase of life during or after this one, however “after” is interpreted.  Such myths outline, as broadly as words can do, humanity’s vision of its nature and destiny, its place in the universe, its sense both of inclusion in and exclusion from an infinitely bigger order.  So while nothing ontological is asserted by literature as such, the imaginative or poetic mode of ordering words has to be the basis of any sense of the reality of nonhuman personality, whether angels, demons, gods, or God. (Words with Power, 22–3)

The schematic theories of language outlined in The Great Code and Words with Power move in opposite directions: from the poetic to the descriptive in the former; from the descriptive to the poetic in the latter.  In addition, the progression in the former is more or less historical; in the latter, this movement is reversed.  At this point in the mental diagram of Frye’s second schema there is no excluded initiative for the poetic mode.  But there is an initiative that has been generally excluded from Frye’s previous works, and this is the experience of metaphor by the reader, especially what Frye calls existential or ecstatic metaphor.  He refers to this “something else” as beyond the literary, and this something else turns out to be the excluded initiative of the poetic, though it takes him another seventy-five pages to say so.  In Words with Power the excluded initiative or the real kerygma is, similarly, “a mode of language on the other side of the poetic” (Words with Power, 101).  The reference here is to the reader’s experience of the Bible, but the power of the experience applies to poetic works as well.  In fact, Frye says that we have to “go through the territory of literature” to get there, and this is the point at which Words with Power makes a radical departure from Frye’s previous work.  “Spirit,” he says in a different formulation, “is the initiative excluded from literature” (Late Notebooks, 1:272).

The excluded initiative of the poetic is what permits the reader to move from the panoramic apocalypse, a detached vision, to the participating apocalypse, an engaged one –– which is a kind of paravritti or reversal for Frye himself.  He does not emphasize this in Words with Power, but he does remark in one of his notebooks for Words with Power that “the recovery and incorporating of the excluded initiative of experiencing literature marked the first step from the Anatomy that I’ve taken” (Late Notebooks, 1:297).  Kerygma moves beyond the poetic, embracing the reader’s existential experience.  It is a key principle in Frye’s expanded theory of language.  [On kerygma, see Michael Happy, “The Reality of the Created: From Deconstruction to Recreation,” in Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye, ed. Jeffery Donaldson and Alan Mendelson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 81–96.]  I wonder if some of Frye’s observations about the phases and modes of language might not dovetail into Trevor Losh‑Johnson’s interests.