Register And Its Language Metafunction Realizations--A Contrastive Study Of Medical Case Reports

Register, which is an inseparable part of linguistic analysis, has received more and more attention these days. According to Halliday (1985), register is a semantic concept. It can be defined as a configuration of meanings that are typically associated with a particular situation of field, mode, and tenor. Since it is an integration of meanings, however, register also includes the lexicogrammatical and phonological features that typically accompany or realize these meanings.According to Halliday, the relationship between language components (the experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions) and context variables (field, tenor and mode) is called "realization", i.e. "the way in which different types of field, tenor and mode condition experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning"(Eggins and Martin, 1997). In this paper, we will mainly look at the way the three metafunctions realize the three variables. The materials chosen for the analysis are two medical case reports. One is "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", a medical case study taken from a collection of biographical anecdotes by Sacks; the other is 'Number Processing and Calculation in a case of Visual Agnosia', an article by Pesenti in Cortex, a neuropsychological journal. These two texts are both concerned with a patient suffering from visual agnosia. However, the case of each patient is detailed in different genres of writing. Normally, people have a deep-rooted idea that professional medical reports follow the argument of the scientist, and all the events are paralleled to support their claims with the demonstration of the need for scientific expertise and mediation. This is quite true to Pesenti's report. On the other hand, Sacks' report is radically different. In Sacks', the encounter between the doctor and the patient is chronologically dramatized. Sacks acts as the chronicler; he presents himself as empathetic 'Dr Sacks', testing casually and conversationally, entering his patient's world and solving the mystery of the disease. Sacks' text emphasizes the strangeness and awesomeness of his subject. He is consciously appealing to a general readership. Therefore, his work has the features of popular texts. This paper attempts to find out how medical case reports found in popular stories differ from typical professional ones due to the differences in register.