Identifying Factual Information in English Medical Texts

Abstract

The article investigates the problem of identifying factual information in written medical texts in English and determining its prominence. Published medical research keeps doctors informed about modern trends in medical science, and while writing such articles, researchers create texts using general as well as special knowledge, taking into account the development of the medical science and society as a whole. Since English is used as a lingua franca in the global medical science and is highly instrumental in creating a specific worldview, this paper examines the influence of the society’s social and historical development on shaping English medical texts, focusing specifically on ways of identifying factual information included because of extralinguistic factors which impact the process of research and learning and find their expression in written texts. The author seeks to define and describe types and ways of expressing factual information in written medical texts in English. The texts for the study were chosen randomly from the PubM website and contained descriptions of experiments, research methods, and research results. The article presents the results of structural linguistic analysis of factual information in these texts, enabling us to identify the percentage of lexical and syntactic units which denote place, geographic range, time, methods, strategies, and tools for studying the human body. Factual information is characterized by high information density and is primarily expressed by nouns which can be identified as terms. Complex sentences also contribute to the informational density of medical texts.