Article published In: Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 13:1 (2015) ► pp.81–105
Medical term formation in English and Japanese
A study of the suffixes gram, graph and -graphy
Published online: 23 June 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.13.1.04her
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.13.1.04her
This paper presents a translingual study of medical lexicology in English and
Japanese that compares the meaning and usage of three suffixes often found in
medical discourse: -gram, -graph and -graphy. By means of an in-depth observation
of frequency counts and semantic profiling in actual usage, we present
a proposal regarding which roots each of the suffixes allow, together with an
analysis of the meaning subtleties of the affixes. This work, informed by both
cognitive and corpus linguistics, advances the presence of a concurrent pattern
in English-Japanese morphology within medical discourse. After presenting a
number of parallelisms and differences within the corpora, the work concludes
with an explanation of how and why the three suffixes under inspection display
quite distinct meaning nuances that restrain them from being used at random,
both in English and in Japanese.
Keywords: derivative morphology, medical terminology, Japanese, lexicology, English
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