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.