by Roslyn Frank
Full Citation Reference:
Frank, Roslyn M. 2009. “Shifting Identities: Metaphors of discourse evolution.” In: Andreas Musolff and Joerg Zinken (eds.), Metaphor and Discourses, pp. 173-189. Palgrave MacMillan.
Evolutionary models of discourse history that follow a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) approach and emphasize... more
Evolutionary models of discourse history that follow a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) approach and emphasize socio-cultural situatedness of discourse metaphors aim to avoid some of the pitfalls of more genetically inspired linguistic models that include linguistic counterparts of DNA or even the genes/memes/lingueme analogical sequence, with the result that the heuristic of the biological source tends to excessively control the conceptual shape of the resulting analogically conceived linguistic target. In this chapter we explore epistemological and methodological aspects of these contrasting paradigms, concluding that more attention to context and agency is needed when appropriating these genetically inspired models, while the adoption of a CAS framework could produce a larger, more expansive conceptual platform for research into discourse metaphor networks.
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 area 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 cross-fertilization 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, e.g., Croft (2000), Steels (1999) and most recently, Sharifian (2003, 2008; Frank, 2008a).
These initiatives represent a conscious move away from the linear, Cartesian-Newtonian mode of thinking and the linear conceptualization of causality characteristic of earlier models of ‘language’ and ‘language change’ and, as such, these steps represent movement toward (re-)descriptions of the phenomenon of ‘language’ more in terms of a self-organizing, dynamic system. The notion of a self-organizing, dynamical system is central to Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory, also known as Dynamical Systems theory (see Clark 1997). Recently another avenue has opened up for applications of CAS thinking, namely, the potential that this theoretical framework has for the analysis of discourse metaphors. The latter are defined as ‘relatively stable metaphorical mappings that function as a key framing device within a particular discourse over a certain period of time’ (Zinken, et al., 2008).
The present chapter focuses first on the applications of CAS thinking to the notion of discourse metaphor networks. Then, an exemplary analogical sequence is explored: the evolution and discourse career of a biological concept, namely, that of the ‘gene’. Although this term first appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, only in the past decade has it started to penetrate the discourse of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, revealing at the same time its ability to generate extended metaphor formations in the linguistic sciences. More concretely, I will discuss several analogical expansions of this base concept of a ‘gene’, showing how they currently function as a productive source for heuristic inferences in contemporary discussions of language and language change, particularly in the case of those attempting to incorporate an evolutionary or Neo-Darwinian perspective into their overall explanatory model for language evolution or language change, sometimes referred to as a ‘population approach’ where ‘language’ is treated, analogically, from the perspective of a ‘species’ or ‘population’.
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