The phraseology of rhetoric, collocations and discourse in cancer research abstracts

Christopher Gledhill (1)

1 CLILLAC-ARP (EA_3967) - Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus

This paper describes the development of scientific ideas in cancer research articles. The paper argues that language is a key process in the innovation as well as dissemination of scientificknowledge. The aim is to ground linguistic analysis in the specific context of a discoursecommunity, firstly to find a basis for teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP, Swales1990) but also to improve the textual analysis offered by current linguistic studies of large textcorpora (Sinclair 1991, Stubbs 1982, 1996). The paper is based on the working context of thePharmaceutical Sciences Department at Aston University. Fifteen researchers in thedepartment were shadowed and their research was observed to give a contextual backdrop toan analysis of the discourse of cancer research. In a corpus of 150 research articles, phraseology is seen to vary systematically in rhetorical sections and the concept of phraseology is postulated as the preferred way of expressing a delimited set of semantic andcommunicative roles. Our findings also indicate that research articles use language to createscience by reformulating data as research models and by altering the established patterns of phraseology. Some samples of our wider results are developed here. Contrasting new ideaswith the accepted way of saying things (the phraseology of cancer research) is seen as a keymechanism in science writing and the dissemination of science. Science should therefore not be seen as an ideology transmitted via language, but as a discourse mediated by themechanisms of textual reformulation and innovation.

Mots clés: specialized phraseology; phraseology of rhetoric; research abstracts studies

Domaines: Linguistique

Christopher Gledhill. The phraseology of rhetoric, collocations and discourse in cancer research abstracts. The International Multidisciplinary Conference, University of Hong Kong, Jun 1996, Hong-Kong, China. ⟨hal-01220423⟩