The Use of Person-centered Language in Medical Research Articles Focusing on Hearing Loss or Deafness

2022 ◽  
Vol Publish Ahead of Print ◽  
Author(s):  
Savannah Nicks ◽  
Austin L. Johnson ◽  
Brett Traxler ◽  
Matthew L. Bush ◽  
Lacy Brame ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
Isabel Verdaguer ◽  
Judy Noguchi

AbstractThis paper examines the collocational patterns of frequent verbs in medical research articles, and proposes a way to help non-native speakers of English learn word combinations frequently used in specific professional genres. We explore the correlations in the syntactico-semantic behavior and the collocational patterns of related verbs, in order to systematically teach recurrent word combinations.To this end, we present a corpus-based analysis of the collocational patterning of the verbs which belong to the same semantic frame inFrameNet, the frame EVIDENCE. These verbs were identified in 397 medical research articles from a pre-release version of the PERC (Professional English Research Consortium) corpus (3,155,118 tokens and 115,960 word types). The verbs examined, in approximate order of degree of increasing certainty, aresuggest, argue, show, reveal, prove, demonstrate, substantiate, verify, confirmandcorroborate. The results reveal that verbs that can be grouped into semantic and syntactic coherent sets also share combinatorial properties. We conclude that, rather than studying isolated verbs, making learners aware of these patterns of verb groups can greatly contribute toward efficient learning of the language of professional texts.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Rundblad

The role of passive voice as a device used in medical and scientific discourse to mystify the author is clearly articulated and well-known. Through analysis of the Methods section of nine medical research articles, this paper shows that metonymy is another frequently used impersonalisation strategy in medical discourse. Furthermore, this paper argues that impersonalisation is not restricted to the authors and that two types of impersonalisation need be distinguished: generalisation and socialisation. Discourse agents were categorised into the ‘present authors’ versus ‘other researchers and health professionals not part of the research team’. Agents were investigated in relation to impersonalisation and social identity. Results show that possessive/causative metonyms are used to produce genderless, generic ‘present authors’ as well as ‘other researchers’. In contrast, more significant ‘health professionals’ are often referred to in terms of representational/locative metonyms highlighting their authoritative social identity. The study also shows that for these non–authorial professionals co-occurrence of metonymy and passive voice is generally avoided. Although ‘present authors’ are mainly absent, this analysis reveals a higher than expected author presence resulting in a significantly higher degree of impersonalisation for non-authorial agents.


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