A Study On Medical English Vocabulary From The Perspective Of Iconicity Theory

As medical technology is developing in an incredibly pace nowadays, exchange of medical technology and information increases. Consequently, Medical English has become a required course for medicine major students. However, medical students discover it annoying or boring to recite all those long, sophisticated Medical English lexis.Medical English Words appear to be random and complicated indeed at first glance, hence, it’s difficult for the medical students to memorize those words.However, from the perspective of the iconicity theory, there is a natural resemblance or analogy between the linguistic form and the object it refers to. To put it in another way, there is a special relationship between the word form and it’s meaning. If this kind of relationship in medical English is revealed, medical students will memorize these medical words easily. There have been several studies proving that a knowledge of the iconic feature of Medical English Vocabulary facilitates the memorization of those medical lexes.Accordingly, this paper aims to explore the iconic feature of Medical English Vocabulary with the qualitative analysis as the major method and the quantitative analysis as the supplementary. In the research, the paper firstly gives a detailed introduction on the iconicity theory as well as its development as a literature review on the research topic. Subsequently, this paper focuses on a qualitative, descriptive and interpretative study on the iconic feature of Medical English Vocabulary. To be more specific, this paper identifies, describes, analyzes and interprets the iconic feature of Medical English Words. What’s more, specific frequently-used examples are used to manifest that Medical English Lexis is iconic. In fact, there are four types of iconicity among medical lexis: phonological iconicity, morphological iconicity,semantic iconicity and etymological iconicity. Each kind of iconicity is divided into several subcategories. A quantitative method is also applied to analyze the iconicity of Medical English Vocabulary. It can be concluded that large amounts of medical words are embedded with iconic feature. Based on these iconic features, this paper proposessome strategies to improve the efficiency of medical vocabulary memorization. These strategies include phonological analysis, formation analysis and derivational analysis,association strategy and etymological analysis strategy.One point to be noted is the etymological iconicity of Medical English Vocabulary. Commonly, Etymological iconicity is to study the word meaning through its origin. Former studies on the etymological iconicity of Medical English Vocabulary described Medical English Lexis originated from the ancient Greek and Rome myth. However, the thesis proposes that considerable amount of medical English words come from another origin--general English vocabulary. These words are known as amphibious words or semi-medical words. Hence, this paper researches the etymological iconicity of Medical English Vocabulary from two origins: Medical English Words originated from the ancient Greek and Rome myth and Medical English Words derived from general English vocabulary.