Book Details

This book adds to the coming of age of interdisciplinarity in specialized discourse and translation research, with ground-breaking contributions that touch upon genre-oriented issues in medical texts. The overriding idea one should keep in mind after reading it is that no discourse - not even scientific discourse - is free from all textual and ideological subtexts, and this implies that ethics or the persuasive use of metaphoric language should be considered as an integral part of real-life medical discourse. Javier Franco, Universidad de Alicante, Spain The book shows the amazing diversity of medical discourse. We learn from it that neither medicine nor linguistics should sit aloof in their ivory towers - bridges can be built between them. Both can be brought down to earth and they can serve each other, to the benefit of those who need help the most. Zoltan Kovecses, Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary This volume sheds light on the understanding of cognitive, textual, linguistic, ethical and discourse-specific features operating in medical discourse in professional, academic, and popular settings. It is a most welcome and useful book that provides an excellent overview of a wide variety of topics. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in the language of medicine and in medical communication. Francoise Salager-Meyer, University of the Andes, Venezuela

This volume investigates the features and challenges of medical discourse between medical professionals as well as with patients and in the media. Based on corpus-driven studies, it includes a wide variety of approaches including cognitive, corpus and diachronic linguistics. Each chapter examines a different aspect of medical communication, including the use of metaphor referring to cancer, the importance of ethics in medical documents addressed to patients and the suitability of popular science articles for medical students. The book also features linguistic, textual and discourse-focused analysis of some fundamental medical genres. By combining sociological and linguistic research applied to the medical context, it illustrates how linguists and translation specialists can build bridges between health professionals and their patients.