Using multiword collocations as a tool to address the demands of conventionalized medical discourse for international publication

Abstract

Scholars in the medical field have described medical writing as particularly challenging and have called for instructional support for both novice writers and L2-English medical scholars. One of the main challenges is that there exist conventionalized terms that express a wide range of concepts, and any inappropriate use of such terms can lead to miscommunication with real consequences for practitioners, researchers, and the public. Therefore, the investigations of such conventionalized expressions could constitute a good starting point in addressing some of the challenges in medical writing. Thus, the present study investigates the use of multiword collocations (a type of register-specific word combinations) in medical research articles and the medical case reports, using two corpora of over a million words, representative of the two registers. The subsequent structural and functional analyses revealed that the majority of multiword collocations in both registers consisted of complex noun phrases mostly formed through noun premodifications (e.g., fine needle aspiration, fluorescence in situ hybridization, single nucleotide polymorphisms). The identified sequences served distinct discourse functions that reflect the differences in the specific communicative functions of the two registers. Some pedagogical applications are suggested in this paper.