Do Social Sciences and Humanities Speak the Language for Specific Purposes? A Look at Archaeological Texts

Abstract

The unbreakable bond between language and scientific thought has incarnated into a special way of using general language, which we call language for specific purposes. It is thanks to this language that articulation of observations, conceptual and semantic constitution of scientific fields and exchange of new knowledge are possible. Language for specific purposes is not a new system of signs, rather it uses all the linguistic resources contained within general language, from which it is inseparable. Its peculiarity lies in the frequency and the specific ways of using lexicon and morphosyntactic structures, especially the ones which help it approach the ideal of precision and brevity of expression. In the first part of the paper, in addition to the detailed definition of the concept of language for specific purposes, we analyze which language is necessary for scientific purposes, whether or not scientists understand one another and if there are any universal characteristics of language for specific purposes. The second part of the paper is devoted to a smaller study with the goal of questioning some general traits of the language of archeology, performed on a group of abstracts originally written in the Serbian language.