ON THE CONCEPT OF IDENTITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

ON THE CONCEPT OF IDENTITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE

Author:  V.Z. Demyankov

Affiliation:  RUDN University

Abstract:  Identity can be considered as a continuous process of assigning properties to the objects in question. These attributions can contradict each other, leading to various intermediate results, which themselves are subject to changes in space and time.
As part of the terminological apparatus of various sciences, the term ‘identity’ is used and interpreted in different ways. Sciences coordinate their efforts in identifying objects, personalities, events, etc., but the objects of study of sociologists and psychologists do not completely coincide with the objects of study of ethnologists, and the objects of study of linguists differ from the objects of study of philosophers. Therefore, we are dealing with a family of different terminological systems rather than a single terminological system. Identity as a general methodological concept in linguistics is used in the study of multilingualism, variability of linguistic expressions, code-switching, society's attitude to facts and events, etc. All of them presuppose certain standards of measuring and of comparing identified objects.
There are at least two approaches to identity as a prototype or ‘standard’. Within the framework of one of them, each person has one rigidly fixed “deep” identity, which manifests itself in all identification situations, giving a “surface” result of contextualization, analogously to deep and surface structures in generative linguistics of the 1970s. According to another (‘surfacist’) approach, identity can only be contextual. Most likely, as always, the truth lies quietly in the middle... But where exactly does it lie?
Based on the corpus of Russian and foreign scientific publications over the past 15 years, some features of the contemporary use of the concept of identity in social sciences and humanities are analyzed. The study supports the surfacist view. In addition, the signs (or properties, markers, features, etc.) of identity are constantly being improved in the course of reaching a compromise between the individual(s) involved in the scholarly research and the culture(s) of the environment, in which the identified objects correspond to representative prototypes.

Keywords:  cognitive linguistics,identity, cognitive identity, identity discourse, terminology of social sciences and humanities, adequacy of translation, identity of original.

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Acknowledgments:  The research is financially supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project No. 24–18–00702 at the RUDN University.

For citation:  Demyankov, V. Z. (2025). On the concept of identity in scientific discourse. Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 4, 5-16 (In Russ.).

Pages:  5-16