While schoolbooks have already been investigated regarding the linguistic constructions of social inequality and their underlying ideologies (see e.g., Geuenich 2015), there is no comparable re-search on textbooks of tertiary education. However, introductory textbooks, which teach students the basics of a subject and thus also the self-concept of an academic discipline (cf. Fleck [1935] 2010), are ideologically imbued texts in which social realities and societal orders of belonging are constructed as 'ordinary'. They thus play a central role in the constant reproduction of social ine-qualities.
This is where our exploratory study comes in: With an analytical focus on classicist ideologies in the discipline of German linguistics, we apply a critical sociolinguistic perspective to introducto-ry textbooks about German grammar. This academic discipline is a particularly interesting field of critical research because it positions itself as 'descriptive', obscuring its own social perspectivi-ty and positionality. In order to uncover the discipline’s implicit ideologies, we examine exempla-ry sentences (the object language) on which grammatical concepts are explained in the textbooks. These sentences have an important function as representations of language use and thus as (dis-torted) representations of 'ordinariness' and social reality: If non-academic perspectives are de-valued or even denied in them, while at the same time social positions of an academic middle and upper class are constructed as 'ordinary' and desirable, social exclusion mechanisms are set in motion. In order to track down such mechanisms, a corpus of sample sentences from intro-ductory grammar textbooks in German linguistics will be evaluated qualitatively with particular regard to semantic frames.