Das Konzept des "Digitalen" in Theologie, Homöopathie, Medizin, Linguistik und Recht. Ein Beitrag zur korpuslinguistischen, kontrastiven Fachsprachen- und -diskursforschung

Abstract

This paper presents both the approach and first results of an ongoing project devoted to the computer-based corpus-linguistic analysis of the concept “digital” as applied in selected domains of specialized communication. Although the role of ‘digitality’ and ‘computers’ in non-professional discourse (in particular in the media) has been studied in detail, very little is currently known about the related concepts and their linguistic representation in professional discourse. There has been no empirical research published yet. The present study is based on a large, digitalized corpus of scientific articles drawn from theological, linguistic, homeopathic and legal journals that were processed by computer linguistics. Inductive, semi-automated contrastive and frame-linguistic corpus analyses were applied to reveal similarities and differences in the professional communicative conceptualization of the “digital”. This project contributes to the empirical, cultural and discourse-linguistic research on specialized professional communication and expands in its scope to the “Digital Humanities”.