Chapter Sixteen
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instrumental setting, individual factors such as breaking force and resulting
effect after exposed pressure become objectified and thus tangible for
scientists’ communicative scrutiny.
Scientists do not only face communicative challenges when discussing
research with one another, in fact, communication about food products and
their assessment becomes increasingly difficult when scientists rely on
consumers opinions. A number of studies has observed consumers’ and
experts’ differing communicative strategies and distinct choice of words
when discussing tastes, as well as the varying meanings/associations
which interlocutors connect to taste descriptions (Diederich 2015 for a
detailed discussion of the semantics of crispy and crunchy in laypeople vs.
expert communication; see Lehrer (2009) for a analysis on how laypeople
and enologists communicate differently about wine).
An analysis of individual features (Péneau et al. 2009 on the concept of
freshness) or individual terminological units (see Diederich 2015 on crispy
and crunchy) shows that meanings are closely tied a) to the use of the
scientific vocabulary found in a text, b) to the scientific event which is
discussed, e.g. the fracture of a battered food product, and c) to the general
objectives of the scientific domain. Consequently, an understanding of
specialized language relies on a detailed conceptualization of the event and
domain in which this terminology is used.
The scientific text as frame
Scientific studies, for instance as published in journals, offer a written
resource characterized by a strong use of specialized terminology.
Furthermore, the structure of the research article typically resembles the
experimental procedures which underlie the text, thus serving as a tool to
reconstruct the event which is linguistically encoded. It is this link
between the linguistic documentation and the scientific practice that serves
to conceptualize a given domain and in return, gain an improved
understanding of the function of specialized language. The scientific text
thus represents a frame which captures conceptual and linguistic
information associated with the scientific field. I adopt Fillmore’s notion
of the frame as a knowledge schema which is evoked by a linguistic
trigger (Fillmore 1976; 2006). For instance, when a lexeme evoked a
specific scenario, it retrieves prior information from our memory and
activates knowledge that we typically connect to a situation (Busse 2012:
11). The scientific text presents a resource to observe the experiential
schema which is interlinked with the use of terminology. In her extensive