UPSI Digital Repository (UDRep)
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UPSI Digital Repository (UDRep)
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| Abstract : |
| The prime aim of the study is to measure the degree of closure of one form of clinical language (specifically nursing textbooks and journals) in order, first, to determine whether these two restricted forms of clinical language can be rightly categorized as a sublanguage; second, to understand better the linguistic features of the language of the nursing domain; and finally, to better understand the nature of sublanguage. In this study, nursing textbook and journal corpora are compared to weather reports and the BNC Sampler. The findings show that none of the linguistic inventories of these corpora approach closure. Investigations conducted on the weather reports show that the corpus approaches closure at many levels. The BNC Sampler, however, behaves exactly as unconstrained language is expected to. The findings show that the nursing textbooks and journals seem to belong in a middle area between highly constrained language and highly unconstrained language. The findings of the study reveal that the idea of a sublanguage is problematic. The original definition of a sublanguage seems to clearly divide sublanguage or constrained language from unconstrained language and placing both as a dichotomy between two discrete categories. However, the findings regarding the nursing textbooks and journals seem to show that there is no explicit or clear-cut boundary that divides constrained language from unconstrained language. |
| References |
1. BNC Consortium (2001). British National Corpus (BNC world Edition, Version 2). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. Available online at: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ Bross IDJ (1972). How information is carried in scientific sub-languages. Science, 176(4041): 1303-1307. 2. Deville G (2001). Corpus-based sublanguage modelling for NLP applications: a tentative methodology. In the International Colloquium on Trends in Special Language and Language Technology, Brussels, Belgium. 3. Erickson F (1986). Qualitative Methods in Research on Teaching. In: Wittrock MC (Ed.), Handbook of Research Teaching: 119-161. 3rd Edition, Macmillan, New York, USA. 4. Friedman C, Kra P, and Rzhetsky A (2002). Two biomedical sublanguages: a description based on the theories of Zellig Harris. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 35(4): 222-235. 5. Garside R, Sampson G, and Leech G (1987). The computational analysis of English: A corpus-based approach. Longman, London, UK. 6. Harris Z (1968). Mathematical structures of language. Wiley, New York, USA. 7. Hutchinson T and Waters A (1987). English for specific purposes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. |
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