Everyday academic language in German historiography

The present article investigates the use of everyday academic language in German history writing. The starting point is a brief discussion of the two conceptual tools used in this study: alltägliche Wissenschaftssprache and metadiscourse. The data for an empirical and contextual analysis of everyday academic language have been extracted from a parallel corpus of German history writing. The analysis confirms that the most frequent patterns found in historiographic metadiscourse belong to the category of everyday academic language. It is suggested that one meaningful way of categorizing this vocabulary consists of linking it to a number of acts and processes characteristic of academic writing in general and of history writing in particular, namely the organization of knowledge in textual formats, the accommodation and refutation of existing knowledge claims and the self-reflective identification of cognitive and communicative processes involved in the creation of (historical) knowledge