Numbers and Results vs. Reality and Fate: The Academic Language of Linguistics and Literary Studies

Abstract

The two academic disciplines linguistics and literary studies are often part of one common study program, but they differ in many respects: Their object of study, the methods they use, the type of knowledge they aim to generate, and also the presentation of their work in academic writing. I explore these differences by examining a corpus of German PhD theses from the two disciplines.

The focus of this talk will be twofold: First, I will discuss how we can identify differences between corpora in a data-driven way, i. e. with only few theoretical assumptions. While many data-driven approaches rely on surface-based frequencies of words and sequences of words, I argue for the additional use of syntactic annotations for this purpose. Second, I will present and contextualize the differences between academic texts in linguistics and literary studies that can be detected in this way. I conclude by reflecting more generally on how the results of a data-driven analysis can be integrated into existing theories.