A corpus-based study of the phraseological behaviour of abstract nouns in medical English. A Needs Analysis of a Spanish medical community

• Autores: Natalia Judith Laso
• Directores de la Tesis: Isabel Verdaguer (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2009
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Pedro Guardia Massó (presid.), Pernilla Danielsson (secret.), Suganthi John (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Lingüística
    • Lingüística aplicada
      • Enseñanza de lenguas
    • Lingüística sincrónica
      • Lexicología
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en:  TDX  Dipòsit Digital de la UB 
• Dialnet Métricas: 4 Citas
• Resumen

  • It has been long acknowledged (Carter 1998, Williams 1998; Biber 2006; Hyland 2008) that writing a text not only entails the accurate selection of correct terms and grammatical constructions but also a good command of appropriate lexical combinations and phraseological expressions. This assumption becomes especially apparent in scientific discourse, where a precise expression of ideas and description of results is expected. Several scholars (Gledhill 2000; Flowerdew 2003; Hyland 2008) have pointed to the importance of mastering the prototypical formulaic patterns of scientific discourse so as to produce phraseologically competent scientific texts.Research on specific-domain phraseology has demonstrated that acquiring the appropriate phraseological knowledge (i.e. mastering the prototypical lexicogrammatical patterns in which multiword units occur) is particularly difficult for non-native speakers, who must gain control of the conventions of native-like discourse (Howarth 1996/1998; Wray 1999; Oakey 2002; Williams 2005; Granger & Meunier 2008).The present dissertation aims to analyse native and non-native speakers' usage of five abstract nouns, i.e. agreement, comparison, conclusion, contribution and decision, in medical English. In order to explore non-native speakers' lexical and phraseological command of the five selected nouns, a Worksheet of four exercises was distributed among a community of twenty-four Spanish doctors, who were practising medicine in three different Spanish hospitals; namely, Complejo Hospitalario Universitario de Albacete, Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro and Hospital de Navarra.With the aim of assessing non-native speakers' phraseological competence regarding the use of abstract nouns, their written production will be compared against a native corpus. Thus, it can be claimed that this investigation also attempts to contribute to the linguistic characterisation of the discourse of medical science. More precisely, this thesis project intends to explore native speakers' prototypical lexico-grammatical patterns around the five abstract nouns under investigation. This analysis is based entirely on corpus evidence, since all collocational patterns discussed have been extracted from the Health Science Corpus (HSC), compiled by the Grup de Recerca en Lexicologia i Lingüística de Corpus (GReLiC), University of Barcelona. The HSC consists of a 4 million word collection of health science (i.e. medicine, biomedicine, biology and biochemistry) texts, specifically compiled for the current research study.The exploration of the collocational behaviour of abstract nouns in medical English will serve as a benchmark against which to measure non-native speakers' production.