Table of Contents; List of Figures; List of Tables; Acknowledgements; Chapter One; Chapter Two; 2.1 Defining specialized vocabulary; 2.2 Three methods for delimiting specialized vocabulary; 2.3 Coxhead's Academic Word List; 2.4 The Medical Academic Word List by Wang, Liang and Ge (2008); 2.5 A New Academic Word List by Gardner and Davies (2013); Chapter Three; 3.1 The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA); 3.2 The medical subcorpus in COCA; 3.3 ACAD; 3.4 Conclusion; Chapter Four; 4.1 Methodology of an illustrative medical corpus design; 4.2 Distribution of nouns in WIMECO
4.3 Distribution of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in WIMECO4.4 How useful are the two medical corpora?; Conclusion; Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Bibliography; Author Index; Subject Index
Summary
The question of characterizing academic vocabulary has often been framed in a context that is purely determined by questions of language teaching. The aim in such approaches is to come up with a list of words for learners of English for Special Purposes. This book approaches this question from a more general, empirical perspective, focusing on medical vocabulary. Its main contention is that the characterization of medical vocabulary is much more complex than is suggested by a simple list. In a list, a threshold determines the borderline on a one-dimensional scale between what counts as medical
