The Establishment Of A Medical Lexical Chunk List And Features Of Medical Academic Lexical Chunks

In recent years, lexical chunks have attracted growing attention of researchers. In2010. Simpson-Vlach and Ellis created the Academic Formulas List (AFL) and made great contributions to general English lexical chunks for academic purpose. Durrant(2009), Simpson-Vlach and Ellis(2010) and Ackermann&Chen(2013) suggested that future research should meet the specific needs of learners in different subject areas. However, study on creating lexical chunk list for specific discipline is still in its infancy and no academic lexical chunk list in medicine field has been in public so far. Therefore, this study attempts to establish a list of medical English lexical chunks (MELCs) used frequently in medical research articles (MRAs) and explore the most obvious features of MELCs.In this study,2114-word lexical chunks occurring at least10times and covering at least5articles is selected from the Medicine RAs Corpus of Xi’an Jiao Tong University (XJTU) by both the software AntConc and manual examination. The list is termed as Medical Lexical Chunks List (MLCL). Then, AFL and MLCL will be compared mainly in grammatical structures and pragmatic functions. Finally, the most obvious features of MELCs will be analyzed and presented.The results of the study indicate:1. MLCL established in the study could be a representative medical lexical chunk list, in which the MELCs frequently occurring in MRAs are presented.2. There are some similarities between written AFL and MLCL. Firstly, most of lexical chunks in the two lists are phrasal, rather than clausal. Secondly, prepositional phrases, noun phrases and passive verb phrases are frequently used in academic writing. Thirdly, the functional distribution in AFL is consistent with that of MLCL on the whole. Referential expressions in the two lists take up the largest proportion. However, AFL cannot comprehensively indicate the usage of lexical chunks in medical RAs. Many frequently used lexical chunks in MRAs are not contained in AFL.3. The most obvious features of MELCs are summarized from three aspects. Firstly, Lexical chunks in MLCL tend to possess obvious medical disciplinary features. There are about61(29%) lexical chunks with the most obvious medical disciplinary features in MLCL, which can be seen in Table4.5. Secondly, in terms of structural distribution of lexical chunks, two distinct features are presented: nominalization and passives. Thirdly, in terms of functional distribution of lexical chunks, four distinct features are presented:referential feature, descriptive attributes, cohesive features and epistemic stance.The study is a significant attempt in the establishment of lexical chunk lists in medicine field. The findings from this study are hoped to draw attentions from writers of MRAs and help them to improve quality of their articles. In addition, the study is expected to have some implications for academic writing class and medical English teaching, especially for non-native writers who are studying or interested in English for medical purpose.