Die Figurativität der allgemeinen Wissenschaftssprache des Deutschen

Academic discourse relies on a common register that reaches across disciplinary boundaries. This so-called common language of academia includes terms denoting common objects and actions of academic work in the fields of knowing, understanding and learning, of perceiving and observing, of designing and devising as well as of writing and speaking in their many different forms. In German academic discourse, this common register is highly figurative, often creating problems in bilingual contexts as well as during students’ acquisition of academic discourse. This paper presents an ongoing project to identify, describe and categorize the lexical dimension of this common language of academia by means of corpus-linguistic analyses. It presents operators to distinguish said register from non-academic German as well as discipline-specific discourse. Following these filtering procedures, the figurativity of the identified items is discussed in terms of their spatial-haptic, optical-visual, mental-cognitive and acoustic-linguistic character. Prominent cases of ambiguity, when specific lexical items can be used and read as expressing two figurative aspects, are also identified.