Scientific registers and disciplinary diversification

We present a study on linguistic contrast and commonality in English scientific discourse on the basis of a monolingually comparable corpus. The focus is on selected scientific disciplines at the boundaries to computer science (computational linguistics, bioinformatics, digital construction, microelectronics). The data basis is the English Scientific Text Corpus (SCITEX) which covers a time range of roughly thirty years (1970/80s to early 2000s). In particular, we investigate the disciplinary diversification/relatedness of scientific research articles in terms of register. Our results are relevant for research on multilingually comparable corpora as used in machine translation and related research, since they shed new light on the notion of ‘comparablity’.