Das gemeinsame sprachliche Inventar der Geisteswissenschaften – Repräsentant von Einheit und Vielheit einer Disziplinengruppe

In the humanities, language is of vital importance as a tool for gaining knowledge, as well as for conducting research. However, in spite of its pivotal role, there is still a clear lack of (linguistic) research into the specific language of the humanities, at least as far as German is concerned. As a consequence, the teaching of (German) academic language competence in the humanities is still based more on intuition rather than sound empirical evidence. This article aims at contributing to our understanding of language use in the humanities with regard to the lexical resources employed in the various disciplines of the humanities. Based on a comprehensive empirical study of the lexis used across disciplines in this subject group - the 'common linguistic inventory of the humanities' (GeSIG inventory) - insights are gained into the fundamental properties of the vocabulary of the humanities. A thorough analysis of semantic fields, word families, and lemmata of the GeSIG inventory shows that this vocabulary is characterised, on the one hand, by lexis designating, above all, methodological aspects of research (used interdisciplinarily), and, on the other hand, by lexical items that are rooted more specifically in the various disciplines. This combination of general academic comprehensiveness and disciplinary diversity seems to be a characteristic feature of the language of the humanities on the lexical level.