The linguistic construal of disciplinarity

We analyze the linguistic evolution of selected scientific disciplines over a 30-year time span (1970s to 2000s). Our focus is on four highly specialized disciplines at the boundaries of computer science that emerged during that time: computational linguistics, bioinformatics, digital construction, and microelectronics. Our analysis is driven by the question whether these disciplines develop a distinctive language use—both individually and collectively—over the given time period. The data set is the English Scientific Text Corpus (SCITEX ), which includes texts from the 1970s/1980s and early 2000s. Our theoretical basis is register theory. In terms of methods, we combine corpus-based methods of feature extraction (various aggregated features [part-of-speech based], n-grams, lexico-grammatical patterns) and auto- matic text classification. The results of our research are directly relevant to the study of linguistic variation and languages for specific purposes (LSP) and have impli- cations for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, for example, authorship attribution, text mining, or training NLP tools.