The main features of English academic and professional medical discourses

Abstract

The research objective is to view various ways of complexity reduction of English medical texts on example of Academic Medical Discourse and Professional Medical Discourse. The scientific novelty lies in conducting for the first time the study aimed at investigating the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of academic articles and their professional media reviews in order to estimate the features that contribute to better comprehension of medical texts. The research results show that from the point of quantitative analysis, Professional Medical Discourse demonstrates higher level of simplicity in comparison to Academic Medical Discourse. It can be viewed in reduction of a number of unique and difficult words, overall decrease of word length and growth of syntactic simplicity. Qualitative study reveals that both types of medical discourse have a practically identical index of deep cohesion with the domination of additive conjunctions. Lexical diversity is also presented on the same level, however, in the case of Academic Medical Discourse, it is achieved by the usage of various medical terms and notions that leads to the deterioration of text understanding by a non-professional audience, while in Professional Medical Discourse, more lexical units of common language are applied. At the same time, referential cohesion, word concreteness and level of narrativity dominate in Professional Medical Discourse, which contributes to a general simplification of the presented information.

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: March 25, 2024.
• Published: May 24, 2024.

Keywords

• медицинский дискурс
• сложность текста
• когезия
• лексическое разнообразие
• конкретность слова
• нарративность
• medical discourse
• text complexity
• cohesion
• lexical diversity
• word concreteness
• narrativity

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