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Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 18:2 (2018) ► pp.155–174

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Evaluative language in medical discourse

A contrastive study between English and Spanish university lectures

 | Universitat Jaume I/IULMA (Spain)
Published online: 28 November 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.15018.bel
Abstract
Academic spoken discourse has been a dominant issue for discourse studies researchers for the last 25 years or so. Different spoken academic genres have been analysed (Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Swales, J. M. 2004. Evaluation in Academic Speech. First Forays. In Academic Discourse: New Insights into Evaluation, G. del Lungo Camiciotti and Tognini Bonelli (eds), 31–50. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Berkenkotter, C. and Huckin, T. N. 1995. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication. Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Bhatia, V. 2001. Analysing Genre: some Conceptual Issues. In Academic Writing in Context: Implications and Applications, M. Hewings (ed), 79–92. Birmingham: The University of Birmingham Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 2002. A Generic View of Academic Discourse. In Academic Discourse, J. Flowerdew (ed), 21–39. London: Pearson Education Limited.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Mauranen, A. 2001. Reflexive Academic Talk: Observations from MICASE. In Corpus Linguistics in North America (Selections from the 1999 Symposium), R. C. Simpson and J. M. Swales (eds), 165–178. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Juzwik, M. M. 2004. The Dialogization of Genres in Teaching Narrative: Theorizing Hybrid Genres in Classroom Discourse. Across the Disciplines 11. Available at [URL] [last accessed 15 August 2016]; Crawford-Camiciottoli, B. 2004. Audience-oriented Relevance Markers in Business Studies Lectures. In Academic discourse – New insights into evaluation, G. del Lungo Camiciotti and E. Tognini Bonelli (eds), 81–97. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 2007. The Language of Business Studies Lectures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; among others) thanks to the compilation and the easy access to electronic spoken corpora. This study focuses on the genre of lecture as “the central ritual of the culture of learning” (Benson, M. J. 1994. Lecture Listening in an Ethnographic Perspective. In Academic Listening: Research Perspectives, J. Flowerdew (ed), 181–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) in higher education. Here, I analyse the use of evaluative language in medical discourse lectures. A contrastive study between Spanish and English medical lectures is carried out. To my knowledge, little attention has been paid to the analysis of evaluative language in medical discourse. The present study employs a quantitative and a qualitative approach to analyse four Spanish and English medical discourse lectures with an average of 35,000 words. The English lectures have been taken from the Michigan Corpus of Academic and Spoken English (MICASE) and the Spanish lectures have been recorded and transcribed in the Degree in Medicine course at a Spanish university for the purpose of this study. Corpus analysis tools have been used to analyse attitudinal language expressing explicit evaluation. The findings show similarities and also differences in the use of evaluative markers in academic medical discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background
    • 1.2Choice of features to be analysed
  • 2.The study
    • 2.1Methodology
    • 2.2The data
    • 2.3Context and procedure
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Relevance markers in the EC
    • 3.2Relevance markers in the SC
    • 3.3Evaluative adjectives in the EC
    • 3.4Evaluative adjectives in the SC
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (60)
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