Аннотация:The paper introduces the preliminary results of a systemic functional and semantic study of general scientific (academic) vocabulary in biomedical discourse in comparison with other varieties of scientific discourse, in particular, those of the humanities and social sciences. The research is based on the data of BIOMED, a specially compiled 5,484,665 word corpus of scientific texts on medicine and biology. The frequencies of 10 academic verbs, 10 adjectives and 10 nouns most frequent in biomedical discourse are compared with the frequencies of the same lexical units in the humanities and social sciences (the data obtained from the well-known corpus "Academic Vocabulary List" by D. Gardner and M. Davis). The analysis revealed, on the one hand, massive differences (in some cases 20-30-fold) in the frequency of the same academic words in the discourse of different scientific disciplines and, on the other hand, apparent affinity between biomedical and social sciences in the functioning of lexical items. Statistical analysis of the frequency of individual words is supplemented with a study of the frequency and distribution of their typical collocations, as well as with a qualitative analysis of their semantics in different scientific disciplines. The discourse-conditioned differences and disciplinary preferences in the contextual usage of the same academic lexical unit are demonstrated by the example of the noun response and its most frequent collocations with verbs, nouns and adjectives found in biomedical discourse. The obtained results give sufficient grounds to believe that the distribution, function and semantics of the so-called general scientific vocabulary may exhibit substantial and significant differences across scientific disciplines and thus serve as markers of particular disciplinary discourses.