A corpus-based analysis of the collocational patterning of adjectives with abstract nouns in medical English

This chapter reports on a study that aimed at analysing native speakers’ use of abstract nouns in medical English. More precisely, the study intended to explore native speakers’ prototypical combinatorial patterns of abstract nouns as seen in a self-compiled corpus, the Health Science Corpus. The aim of this chapter is to describe one pattern commonly found in medical English; i.e. abstract nouns in combination with adjectives, and exemplify how this pattern functions within this discourse. The findings reveal interesting points with regard to the positions and typology of adjectives in this pattern. It is hoped that the study will contribute to the linguistic characterisation of medical English and bring to the forefront the usefulness of corpus-based analyses.