Autokommentierendes Handeln in wissenschaftlichen Vorträgen

Oral scientific communication is characterised by specific linguistic expressions used in everyday life, including discourse-organising utterances such as "I'll come back to this later" or "As I said earlier". Such speaker’s references to structure and organisation of his own discourse, which are often referred to as metatext or metadiscourse, are described in the present work as forms of "Autokommentierendes Handeln" (AKH) and examined within the theoretical and methodological framework of Functional Pragmatics. The focus of the empirical analysis is on communicative goals, pragmatic functions and linguistic realisations of AKH within a corpus of transcribed conference lectures. The study also offers a comparison of German and Italian scientific language with regard to the use of temporal and local deictic expressions.