Eristische Strukturen in Vorlesungen und Seminaren deutscher und italienischer Universitäten

“Academic negativity”, as Givón puts it, is the corrective of scientific progress. The criticism new, preliminary knowledge is subjected to avails itself of its very own linguistic devices: eristic structures. These, however, are language-specific and deeply rooted in academic culture. Hence the question how preliminary knowledge becomes accepted knowledge in academia is, quite essentially, a question of linguistic academic socialisation. The contributions to this volume consist of linguistic analyses and transcriptions of German and Italian lectures and seminars. Their purpose is a first comparative approximation of the diff erences between German and Italian academic socialisation with regard to how students are introduced to handling the preliminary status of new knowledge. The transcriptions may very well be the first of their kind. Their analyses reveal that academic teaching takes very different linguistic and institutional paths towards education in academic negativity.