Ontological and Terminological Commitments and the Discourse of Specialist Communities

The paper presents a corpus-based study aimed at an analysis of ontological and terminological commitments in the discourse of specialist communities. The analyzed corpus contains the lectures delivered by the Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Economics. The analysis focuses on (a) the collocational use of automatically identified domain-specific terms and (b) a description of meta-discourse in the lectures. Candidate terms are extracted based on the z-score of frequency and weirdness. Compounds comprising these candidate terms are then identified using the ontology representation system Protégé. This method is then replicated to complete analysis by including an investigation of metadiscourse markers signalling how writers project themselves into their work.