Intralinguistic analysis of medical research papers and abstracts

Studies related to ESP genres have been carried out lately focusing on different levels of analysis, such as internal ordering, lexico-grammatical patterns or terminology. However, there are not many studies combining different levels of analysis so as to observe how information is rendered in scientific genres. The present study intends to offer a description of rhetorical and phraseological patterns observed in medical research papers and abstracts using a semantic and functional approach. Our methodology is descriptively performed on a comparable corpus composed of research papers and abstracts in the field of diagnostic imaging and published in esteemed journals. We will determine composition strategies by means of the description of the authors’ favourite structures found in our corpus. Once these favourite structures have been obtained for every genre, we will proceed with semantic analysis so as to establish their similarities and differences. Our results will, primarily, help translators, technical writers and ESP students to infer discursive strategies in these genres, as well as to better understand some of the discourse aspects of rendering scientific information in general.