Is Language 'All There Is'?

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 20):

Once the labels are under control, then you will be empowered and a whole new way of reading texts is opened up to you – one in which you see texts as semiotic entities that make meaning, rather than as formal entities that pass pre-formed thoughts and feelings from one human being to another. You’ll start to see language as having a far more central place in human existence than you may have imagined before, and may even go through a phase of thinking that language is all there is – since it shapes and categorises everything around us the moment we try to say anything about anything at all. This radical Whorfian phase can be a trying one for peers from other disciplines; some of us never recover from it!

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[1] To be clear, this relates to the epistemological tradition with which SFL Theory aligns. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 416):

meaning is seen as immanent — something that is constructed in, and so is part of, language itself. The immanent interpretation of meaning is characteristic of the rhetorical-ethnographic orientation, including our own approach.

So, on the one hand, language is 'all there is' in the sense that 'all there is' is meaning construed of experience by language. And because, in this view, the content plane of language constitutes the content of consciousness, this epistemological stance is broadly consistent with the philosophy of George Berkeley, who claimed that the material constituents of the world have no subsistence without a mind, and with Quantum Theory, which has demonstrated, in the words of John Wheeler, that 'no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon'. 

But on the other hand, language is not 'all there is' in the sense that the meaning that language construes distinguishes language from other domains of experience, distinguishing, most fundamentally, a material order of phenomena from a semiotic order of metaphenomena — the meanings of language and other semiotic systems.

[2] It is not impossible that this is Matthiessen having an 'under-the-radar' dig at his co-author Martin, who even models the cultural context of language as language (register and genre).