Note that "driving" is a very narrow interpretation of causality, and "determine" is not much better. There is an obvious sense in which a virus "causes" Covid and a bacteria [sic] "causes" tuberculosis, but it is rather vacuous to say that viruses or bacteria "drive" or "determine" epidemics.
Co-evolution involves reciprocation, but not necessarily symmetrical reciprocity. When Halliday says, for example, that every use of a word (even in private speech) will have some effect on the probabilities of a language system, he is not saying that lexical invention is on a par with grammatical regularity. The use of "he or she" instead of "he" does not prevent a single instance of rape much less shake the foundations of patriarchy; these are secured not only by language but also by organised violence (c.f. the work of Annabelle Lukin).I think that when Halliday says that language will always have an "ideological" role, and that construals of reality will differ as we alter our condition, he is really saying that changes in productive relations do in the long run cause the way we speak, even if they do not in the short run "drive" or "determine".
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[1] The quote was Halliday (2003 [1992]: 380):
Language neither drives culture nor is driven by it; the old questions about which determines which can be set aside as irrelevant, because the relation is not one of cause and effect but rather (as Firth saw it, though not in these words) one of realisation: that is, culture and language coevolve in the same relationship as that in which, within language, meaning and expression co-evolve. Thus above and beyond the random, local variation between languages that was the subject matter of earlier typological studies, we may expect to find non-random variation realising different construals of reality across major alterations in the human condition. But given that language and culture evolve together in this kind of relationship, it is inevitable that language will take on an ideological role.
[2] To be clear, here Kellogg is disagreeing with Halliday on the basis of his misunderstanding of Halliday. Halliday is concerned with the relation between the two planes of a connotative semiotic system, where culture is semiotic content, and language is its semiotic expression. For Halliday, the relation between these two semiotic planes is realisation, which is an elaborating relation of identity (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 145). So the relation between culture and language is not causal, because 'cause' is an enhancing relation, not an elaborating one.
Kellogg, on the other hand, misconstrues the semiotic content that is realised in language as the material environment of language (organisms, diseases, rape, organised violence, productive practices). That is, the causal relation he proposes is between first-order material experience (phenomena) and second-order semiotic experience (metaphenomena), not between the culture as semiotic system and the language that realises it. In Halliday's terms, Kellogg is concerned with the ongoing material-semiotic dialectic, not the coevolution of culture and language. Halliday (2003: 238, 255):
The history of language, it seems to me, is part — an integral part — of human history; and this "history" is a dialectic interplay of material and semiotic processes, whose impacting engenders the complex ecosocial systems that we know as human cultures (cf. Lemke 1993 for a powerful account). …
Thus, grammar is bound up with all the other aspects of the human condition, as part of the eco-social system constituted by a human community and its environment. It takes its shape from the other strata of language with which it interfaces, from the relation of "languaging" both to other semiotic and to social and material processes, and from the nature of those processes themselves. It is the outcome of the ongoing dialectic between the material and the semiotic in human life.
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