English across cultures: adapting to new realities

Resumo

As a complex adaptive system language coevolves with its environment changing to maintain language/environment equilibrium is indispensable for its effective functioning. Fundamental environmental changes trigger the equilibrium punctuation (Dixon, 1997) which is exhibited in language functional deficiency. To re-establish the equilibrium and to cover the communicative deficit the dynamics of natural adaptation is enhanced. In this paper mechanisms of the English language adaptation to the new realities it encountered beyond the initial territory were studied. Adaptation process consisting in the transmutation of the products of the speech community perception of the altered environment into cognitive and linguistic structures was modeled. The results suggest that the incorporation of these structures into the extant conceptual and lingual systems manifests the equilibrium recovering.