Phraseology in medical research papers written in English: A text-genre-based study (Spanish text)

This Doctoral Dissertation investigates the use of phraseological units in a specific text-genre published in English.; The purpose of this study was to identify and analyse combinatorial patterns in English medical research articles and how these patterns are used according to the rhetorical organization of discourse in these texts. To identify these patterns an electronic corpus was compiled consisting of research articles published in Radiology, a high impact factor medical journal.; A combination of the contributions from the following fields of study helped to establish a method for the analysis of the patterns in the corpus: language for specific purposes (LSP), discourse analysis (genre-based studies), LSP phraseology and terminology, medical radiology and corpus linguistics.; Word lists were generated from the corpus and six stylistically significant terms were chosen according to their high frequency of occurrence in the corpus. The combinatorial patterns of these former items were identified by means of KWIC concordances. The data revealed two main types of phraseological units in the texts: (1) semi-technical phraseological units, not specific to the subfield of radiology but to the field of medicine in general; (2) technical phraseological units, which are specific to the subfield of radiology. Our findings showed that these two types of units are used in language according to the communicative aims of the articles. These and other findings described in the Thesis indicate that stylistic and rhetorical conventions are present in the language of Radiology and that these features could be extrapolated to other articles in other journals with similar degree of abstraction and dealing with the same topic.