Medical Discourse in Professional, Academic and Popular Settings

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, chapters include 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, this book illustrates how linguists and translation specialists can build bridges between health professionals and their patients.