Models of terminological collocations in medical English discourse

Abstract

Background. The term "collocation" has recently come into use and become popular in modern linguistics, denoting the phenomenon that exists in all languages. Collocations are set expressions formed when one of the words composing the combination preserves its lexical meaning and the other changes it. Purpose – to classify the main models of terminological collocations used in medical English discourse according to syntactic and semantic features. Materials and methods. Contemporary courses of medical English, a number of explanatory medical dictionaries and textbooks on medicine. Conducting the research, we used such methods of lexical analysis as contextual analysis, distributive analysis and the method of semantic field. Results. Having analyzed the lexical content of well-known courses as well as textbooks of medical English we identified the most frequent models of terminological collocations, which were classified according to syntactic and semantic principles. Syntactic models include two- and three-component constructions with highlighting the main ("nuclear") component as well as abbreviations. Semantic models are divided into 9 main groups which name medical specialists, equipment and tools, anatomical terms, symptoms, diseases and conditions, diagnostic and treatment methods as well as some proper names. The article presents the examples of these models in the medical discourse "Cardiology" and emphasizes the importance of studying collocations while working with medical information. EDN: TENYMV

Keywords

• collocation
• terminological collocation
• phrase
• stable phrase
• medical discourse
• medical english