Shifting identities: Metaphors of discourse evolution

Abstract

Over the past two decades developments in the field of cognitive science have brought together pre-existing methodologies and theoretical approaches from a wide variety of disciplines and at the same time promoted cross-disciplinary dialogue relating to the development of new methodologies and theoretical frameworks (Bono, 1990; Maasen and Weingart, 1995, 2000). This cross-fertilization has been particularly rich in the case of researchers concerned with modelling ‘language’ and ‘language change’ in a number of new settings, for example those involved in working with artificial distributed agents associated with research projects in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (A-Life), as well as in the areas of ecolinguistics, biosemiotics and theoretical biology. Whereas a great deal of attention and effort has been focused on developing these models in various subfields of cognitive science, to date less work has been carried out by Cognitive Linguists in terms of attempting to model the entity comprised by ‘language’ through crossfertilization with the evolving methodological and theoretical models found in the ‘hard’ sciences, for example, Complex Adaptive Systems theory (CAS). Nonetheless, in recent years a number of important steps have been taken in this direction, for example Croft (2000), Steels (1999) and most recently Sharifian (2003, 2008) and Frank (2008a).