Abstract

The paper deals with the question what kind of vocabulary writers use, when they are asked to report about their activities during the writing process. The main task was to examine which of their different activities are denoted by single expressions (words) and which of them are not denoted at all. On the basis of interviews with researchers and university students it could be shown that there are a lot of activities which could be denoted by single words (e.g. the activity ‘revising’ can be denoted by the German word ändern), while there are a lot of other activities which were never denoted (e.g. the activity ‘producing the idea of a sentence to be written’). The former ones differ from the latter ones in that they can be perceived physically, and that the objects involved in these activities have solid contours, i.e. that they are organized as a gestalt, while, on the other hand, features of this kind are absent in the activities which could not be denoted. All the expressions that occurred in my corpus are listed in the appendix of this paper.