Im Theorie-Teil der Arbeit werden wir über Mehrsprachigkeit diskutieren – Sprechhandlungsverben in Wissenschafts- und Pressesprache

Abstract

Abstract Speech act verbs are an important part of academic language as authors use them not only to refer to literature or comment on their own text, but also give their own position towards the reported claim (Hyland 2004). Because of their specific use in academic language, they have developed a meaning and usage that sometimes deviates from everyday language, which can pose challenges to learners. This article aims at describing the differences in the use of speech act verbs between the registers of academic and journalistic language. For this purpose, two corpora were compiled and searched for the lemma diskutieren. The resulting items were annotated for grammatical, semantic and functional features. The investigation reveals that the usage of diskutieren differs in semantics (dialogical vs. monological communication) as well as in grammar (prepositional vs. direct object). Furthermore, it could be shown that the specific meaning and usage of the verb in academic language can hardly be derived from common German dictionaries.