Implicit in Halliday's last two sentences is either:a) Prelinguistic infants are not engaged in human semiosis, or.b) Language exists from birth.It seems to me that both of these are clearly false.Instead of Mondrian, consider the attached cave painting. Imagine that the floor of the cave preserves the footprints of the artists who made this mural.
1. The involuntary meaning of the footprints of the artists who made the mural. This seems no different from the meaning that deer tracks convey to a non-human predator.
2. The intentional meaning of the picture of the herdsmen (hunters?) recording their labor. This seems very different, as it invites (because its intention is to allow) the viewer to "reverse engineer" the story, for amusement or profit.
3. The strategically placed hand print done in red ochre. This too seems different again: although it resembles 1) in form and 2) in intension, it probably signals authorship and in that sense has a textual as well as an interpersonal function.None of these seem to me to require the Hallidayan assumption that the viewer possesses language. All of them merely require the Vygotskyan assumption that the object (or "objective") can be inferred from the remains of the object-oriented action.
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[1] To be clear, the last two sentences in the quote (Halliday 2003: 4) were:
All that needs to be said in the present context is that other human semiotics are dependent on the premise that their users also have language. Language is a prerequisite; but there is no need to insist that language can mean it all.
[2] To be clear, neither of these propositions are implicit in the quote, since Halliday's 'present context' is a discussion of human 'post-infancy' semiotic systems.
[3] This is true, as demonstrated by Halliday's extensive work on human protolanguage.
[4] To be clear, the observation of deer tracks by a non-human predator is, according to Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, simply perceptual categorisation on value. No linguistic meaning is involved. The observation of footprints by humans is the construal of experience as the first-order meaning of language.
[5] To be clear, according to comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, cave paintings are expressions of mythic symbolism, and mythic symbolism is the use of (lexical) metaphor to adapt consciousness to its physical and social environments, which requires that the participants had language — as does the fact that the painting is, at most, only about 13,000 years old.
[6] To be clear, the cave painting is to be found in The Cave Of Hands, in Argentina, and since, according to comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, such sites were used for male initiation rites in hunter-gatherer societies, the great number of hand images in this cave might be taken to suggest that they identify the initiates in those rituals. Again, this demonstrates that the participants had language.
[7] As the above demonstrates, this is the exact opposite of what is true. All three require that the human participants had language, and the dating of the cave art provides corroborating evidence.
4 comments:
Careful, Chris. What I said was that the VIEWER did not require language to interpret the cave painting. I don't want to speculate whether the painters themselves had language; I am quite sure they did. But I can easily imagine non-linguistic humans or even animals being able to interpret the paintings as we do without language. In fact, I suspect that a non-linguistic interpretation might be superior to ours, because both you and I tend to interpret the mural as showing hunting, but if you look at it objectively, the way someone without language might, you will see that it probably shows herding.
Quite right about the post being about the viewer, not the painter. I have amended the post accordingly.
I can see that you are a very busy man, Chris. But it's not enough to just change the TITLE of the post. The argument I am making has to do with whether or not the VIEWERS of the cave paintings require language to interpret them. It is similar to the problem that you had earlier with Bonobo phonology. We know that Bonobos have phonology because they interpret human sounds phonologically. Similarly, we know that language is not required to interpret these paintings because we do not require it, nor do we need to assume that the cave painters had it. I don't see how this is "the opposite of the truth", although I must admit that the phrase "the opposite of the truth" is, despite what you say, very far from being clear.
From ChRIS CLÉiRIGh On The Expression Plane Of Languaging Bonobos on Tuesday 14 November 2023:
The languaging bonobos obviously do have a phonological system, since it is this that enables them to identify the words spoken by humans.
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