The publication of the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, Taavitsainen et al. 2010) allows new insights into the nature of specialized discourse in the English Renaissance. One of the unexplored areas is the formulaic character of medical genres, where the use of fixed expressions and repetitive constructions constitutes an important feature of early medical discourse (see Taavitsainen (2001), Hiltunen and Tyrkkö (2009), Mäkinen (2011)). The affinities between different medical genres in the choice of such fixed elements, however, have not been explored.
In this presentation, I extract repetitive fixed patterns from the EMEMT corpus with the help of the lexical bundles method. It was first popularized in applied linguistics by Biber et al. (1999). This corpus-driven, frequency-based method has been adopted in historical linguistics only recently (Culpeper and Kytö 2010, Kopaczyk forthcoming), in view of several technical problems with data processing, e.g. spelling variation. The EMEMT corpus is equipped with a spelling unification feature. On the basis of the extracted lexical bundles, I explore the degree of overlap in the choice of formulaic elements in the early modern medical genres included in the corpus (Scientific journals, General treatises, Texts on specific diseases, Anatomical treatises, Recipe collections and Health guides). The corpus-driven method is likely to reveal patterns of convergence between the pre-defined genres, as well as suggest the most characteristic fixed strings for a given communicative practice.
Biber, D. et al. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.
Culpeper, J., M. Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English dialogues: Spoken interaction as writing. Cambridge: CUP.
Kopaczyk, J. Forthcoming. The legal language of Scottish burghs (1380-1560): Standardisation and lexical patterns. OUP.
Taavitsainen, I. et al. 2010. Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 1500–1700). DVD-ROM with EMEMT Presenter software (R. Hickey). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.