Medical Case Reporting in Czech and English: A Genre-Based Contrastive Analysis
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This study compares and contrasts Czech and English published medical case reports (MCRs) in order to gain insights into their structural and textual variations. Although linguistic, sociological, and literary theoretical studies have examined this genre (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2000, Anspach 1988, and Charon 1992, respectively), there has been no study investigating contrastively MCRs in Czech and English. As such, the study offers an additional cross-cultural perspective on the structural and textual conventions of the genre in the two languages. I address the issue of structure predominantly from the English for Specific Purposes approach by applying the method of Swalesian structural move analysis (1994, 2004) and Hoey’s problem-solution pattern (2001). The specification of the most salient textual features is shown with the aid of a concordance program. Collected data comprise two corpora with 40 MCRs for each language from medical journals specializing in their publication. The results point to differences between the two languages in terms of structural and textual preferences found in the two sets of data. While the genre in English tends to be highly conventionalized and formulaic, its Czech equivalent is substantially less so. In addition, the genre in Czech does not seem to be affected by the Medicine 2.0 movement. However, this movement has a certain impact on the genre in English through, for instance, patients’ contributions to MCRs (reflected in the Patient’s Perspective section). These differences can be ascribed to distinct cultural and academic expectations concerning the genre under investigation. |
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