ABSTRACT
The following chapter presents an overview of the traditional views in the specialist literature on notetaking and then reconstructs notation as an individualized language , exploring the language dimension with regard to word meanings, word formation and infl ection, semantic relations at sentence and text levels, as well as pragmatic functions. It continues in Section 3 by laying the cognitive theoretical foundations against the backdrop of the social constructivist paradigm and then presents an empirical study on the discourse dimension of the use of linguistic notational means in notation texts. In doing so, it outlines the added value of the
methodological tools provided by Relevance Theory (RT) (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995) to analyze the balance between explicit and implicit information in notation texts. In conclusion, it addresses didactic implications.
