Contrasting the rhetoric of abstracts in medical discourse

Abstract

The present study aims at offering a contrastive analysis framework for the specific textual patterns of the expert-to-expert communicative setting from a semantic and a functional approach. Our methodology tries to identify patterns of behaviour in one of the genres that might be said to be exclusive of expert-to-expert discourse in medicine: abstracts. By means of describing regularities, differences in the way information is distributed will be pinpointed. Since textual realizations have been agreed to bridge the distance between the semantic and the functional component, cohesion will be analyzed both as a semantic marker and as an indicator of information distribution — pragmatic marker — according to functional constraints. ‘Ad hoc’ comparable and translation corpora have been built, extracted from medical journals with a significant impact. Intra and interlingual analysis of those corpora has been carried out to attain a comprehensive description of textual patterns from the above mentioned semantic, formal and functional parametrical levels.