Description
Sociolinguistic variation in medical genres: Α contrastive approach to professional and lay medical discourse in the English-Italian language
Elisabetta Lella
UNIVERSITY OF BARI ALDO MORO
Medical discourse is a subject-specific area of meaning realization within a given culture/ language, which is articulated in different genres and registers, ranging between two opposite ends of the so-called “medical cline”. Traditionally, the extremes of the continuum are identified with the professional discourse end (determined by the evolving concept of Evidence-Based Medicine – EBM) and the lay discourse end. Nevertheless, the most recent studies have attempted a different framing for the cline, placing “healthcare discourse” on one end and “clinical discourse” at the other, following the evolution over time of power relations between the participants in medical discourse and the subsequent implications in how meanings are encoded (Baldry, Bianchi, Loiacono 2019).
Changes in social tissue also account, in literature, for the ends of the cline being “fluid” and standing at changing reciprocal distance at different times (Baldry, Bianchi, Loiacono 2019), a phenomenon that has become well-visible today in the global pandemic-related language, as specific lay texts count highly technical medical words, usually belonging to the professional, EBM-driven end of the cline.
Furthermore, the recent years have seen multi-mediality gaining an increasingly prominent position in today’s complex society and, accordingly, in research, literature shows. The importance of addressing and using multimodal and multi-media contents has been discussed in many fields, including Digital Humanities, Corpus Studies, and ELT (English Language Teaching) and EFL (English as a foreign language). Multi-media contents, indeed, provide detailed and context-rich meaning-making units (Halliday, Hasan 1989) capable of making the pragmatic aspects of discourse more readily evident to the observer, and whose analysis can be exploited for corpus-based research or for teaching purposes. (Loiacono, Iamartino, Grego 2011; Vasta, Baldry 2020).
Against this multifaceted background, the present paper aims to contribute to mapping the changes in the medical cline, both at interlinguistic and intralinguistic level, with specific reference to the current pandemic. An integrated corpus-based approach is adopted, comprising web as/for corpus methodologies (Gatto 2014) and more recent multimodal corpus analysis tools (mws.pa.itd.cnr.it). A pilot corpus of about 50 pandemic-related short YouTube videos has been compiled, tagged and prepared for analysis. The preliminary results suggest that the corpus exploration will serve fruitfully the purposes of linguistic mapping as well as teaching purposes.
