| Adams Smith's (1984) seminal article on author's comment is arguably the genesis of the modern study of Medical English (ME) written discourse. For over a decade, linguists such as Biber and Finegan (2001) have reported on a variety of features in ME research articles. However, comparatively fewer linguistic studies have examined the features present in other ME professional texts, such as review articles, or in ME writings produced for non-specialists, such as ME textbooks and patient information texts. An investigation of three distinctive ME genres was conducted in order to improve the understanding of the frequency and function of the linguistic and extratextual features used in these writings.;A corpus of 36 ME texts, totaling over 81,000 words, was constructed; it contained 12 each of the following three genres: medical review articles, medical textbook excerpts and patient information texts. By choosing texts with a primarily informational communicative purpose and by controlling for variables such as topic, date and location of publication and source, audience could be considered as the independent variable. The following dependent variables were examined in the corpus: linguistic features---nominals; personal pronouns; verb tense/aspect/voice/mood; epistemic markers; relative clauses; sentence type; sentence length; extratextual features---visual information; author information; reference lists; and disclaimers. Frequencies of the linguistic features were measured; then ANOVAs, omega2 tests and post-hoc Tukey tests were conducted to identify significant differences among the three genres. A qualitative approach was used in the examination of the extratextual features.;The results from the analysis indicate that the frequencies of certain linguistic and extratextual features vary according to four communicative functions expressed in the ME genres: informational, interactive, organizational and predictive. Furthermore, the same communicative function may be conveyed by different linguistic and extratextual features characteristic to each genre. These findings may benefit medical educators and English for Medical Purposes teachers in instructing prospective and practicing physicians and may be useful to technical writers and health educators in developing effective written materials for patients. |
