A Descriptive Approach to Medical English Vocabulary
Abstract
This paper presents research into the characterization of medical vocabulary in English. It aims at developing an optimal methodological approach to the characterization of medical vocabulary in English. It is based on the analysis of data from the medical subcorpus of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Earlier corpus-based research into medical vocabulary was carried out mainly from a pedagogical perspective and resulted in medical word lists. In those approaches, all criteria are based on absolute frequencies. It would not be sufficient to replace absolute frequency with relative frequency, because a minimal degree of absolute frequency is also necessary. What I show is that the threshold to be set for the absolute frequency interacts with the relative frequency. Therefore a measure based on the interaction of absolute frequency and relative frequency is shown to provide a better tool for identifying medical vocabulary than previously used measures.
Session
Lexicography for Specialised Languages, Terminology and Terminography
Keywords
relative frequency; absolute frequency; corpus; language for specific purposes (LSP)
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX2016-058,
author={Renáta Panocová},
title={A Descriptive Approach to Medical English Vocabulary},
pages={529-540},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th EURALEX International Congress},
year={2016},
month={sep},
date={6-10},
address={Tbilisi, Georgia},
editor={Tinatin Margalitadze, George Meladze},
publisher={Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi University Press},
isbn={978-9941-13-542-2},
}
