Search results for "medical discourse"
showing 8 items of 8 documents
Eponyms or Descriptive Equivalent Terms? The Question of Scientific Accuracy in Medical Discourse
2008
A large part of medical lexicon is made up of eponymous terms. These have often been an object of debate and disagreement among specialists and linguists. More precisely, some claim that eponyms should be maintained, while others are inclined to substitute them with descriptive equivalent terms. The aim of this work is to highlight the importance of linguistic accuracy in medical communication through the analysis of the main advantages and disadvantages involved in both the use of eponyms and descriptive terms. The work is divided into four main parts. The first part provides a classification of the various types of medical eponyms, according to the types of names they can include. The sec…
Metaphor they heal by?
2014
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of figurative speech in Medical English paying special attention to the use of metaphors in medical discourse. After briefly introducing the recent approaches to the study of metaphors based on psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theories, we propose a qualitative analysis of selected medical texts with three aims: (1) at a lexical level, to find out how commonly doctors use metaphors to name pathologies, and to classify such metaphors in relation to their linguistic type; (2) at a psycholinguistic level, to investigate if metaphors, when used to denominate an illness, use metaphoric mappings; (3) at a communicative level, to establish if do…
The status of medical eponyms: advantages and disadvantages
2011
The aim of this paper is to analyse how physicians use eponyms for naming the evolution of a scientific discovery in order to describe the different features of eponyms. In the first section a brief classification of medical eponym is given, attention is then turned to the main positive and negative aspects of these honorific names in the language of Medicine in a diachronic perspective with linguistic and ethical considerations.
Medical English Translation into Italian. The Case of Netter's Work
2020
Of the various specialized languages, that of the medical sciences undergoes, perhaps, the fastest changes. Medical innovations, whether new drugs or devices, therapies or advanced technologies, are quickly shared at a global level. For this reason, there is constant activity of medical translation. The latter is generally associated with the concept of terminological accuracy. However, if lexical precision is a fundamental feature in medical discourse, a good translation is also the result of compliance with the stylistic and syntactical rules that are typical of the language of medicine in the target language (TL). This paper investigates the linguistic characteristics of a 151,121-word c…
Allo-repetition in Academic Settings. Cooperation, Understanding Co-construction and Knowledge Negotiation in the Medical Section of the ELFA Corpus
2015
In recent years, spoken academic ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) has been an object of in- creasing interest in linguistic and communication studies thanks to the position of academia as “one of the domains which have most eagerly adopted English as their common language in in- ternational communication” (Mauranen 2006a: 146) 1. In a context where different linguistic and cultural backgrounds come together, clarity and explicitness play a prominent role. In this respect, ELF research has paid much attention to the importance of communicative strategies, the most prominent of which is repetition. ELF studies on repetition have been carried out in several do- mains, including academia. Withi…
Ciència i moral. En els orígens de la maternitat totalitzant
2012
En la construcció i difusió com a model normatiu d’una imatge de la maternitat entesa com a vocació totalitzant, tasca exclusiva, destí natural i plena realització de les dones, el discurs científic, i de manera molt especial, el mèdic, ha exercit un paper clau. Explorarem els orígens d’aquest model en els textos mèdics divulgatius i la literatura de ficció del segle XVIII.
A Genre Approach to Electronic Rapid Responses from the Online British Medical Journal
2015
El contínuo crecimiento de las comunicaciones electrónicas en las ciencias médicas ha creado nuevas esferas de interacción en las que sus participantes evalúan las contribuciones científicas realizadas por otros expertos. El presente estudio se aborda como caso práctico de Análisis de Discurso Comparativo. En la tradición del Análisis del Discurso, y del Análisis de Género, la presente tesis procede inicialmente a caracterizar cuantitativamente, en términos de frecuencia, un corpus de Respuestas Rápidas Electrónicas (e-RRs) en la revista British Medical Journal (thebmj.com) para, a continuación, proceder al estudio de las diferencias en la organización del discurso de dos subgéneros médicos…
Perspectives in Medical English
2014
This volume explores the Italian situation of English for Specific Purposes as employed in a highly specialized and exclusive scientific-professional domain: medicine. The papers collected here deal with both the research and the didactics of English for Medical Purposes (EMP), seen as integrated aspects of the same linguistic phenomenon. The first part outlines the current status of EMP research and didactics in Italy, with reflections on the development and usage of EMP (Kim Grego, Paola Baseotto, Roberta Mullini, Elisabetta Lonati, Marianna L. Zummo and Tatiana Canziani). The second part offers insights into the present and short-term future of Englishteaching in medicine and health-rela…