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Article In:
Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 47:1 (2024) ► pp.98–121

Contrastive study of verbal structures in medical and general corpora in French

| Univ. Lille, CNRS UMR 8163 — STL — Savoirs Textes LangageLille
| Univ. Lille, CNRS UMR 8163 — STL — Savoirs Textes LangageLille
This study examines the syntactic features of French medical and general texts to clarify their complexity and implications for comprehension. By analysing corpora from both domains, we found significant differences in the use of passive voice, present participles, negation and gerund constructions. In medical texts, the passive voice and present participles are more frequent, reflecting specialized discourse and precision. In contrast, negation and gerunds are more common in general texts, emphasizing the diversity of syntactic structures, and specific stylistic and argumentative effects. Our findings underline the need for clear communication in medical texts and provide empirical evidence for the simplification.
Keywords: contrastive analysis, general and medical-language corpora, syntactic structures, NLP
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work
    • 2.1Readability of texts
    • 2.2Simplification of texts
  • 3.Objectives
  • 4.Description of the data analyzed
    • 4.1Corpora studied
      • 4.1.1General-Language corpus
      • 4.1.2Medical-Language corpus
    • 4.2Syntactic structures studied
      • 4.2.1Passive voice
      • 4.2.2Present participle
      • 4.2.3Gerund
      • 4.2.4Syntactic negation
  • 5.Approach for the contrastive analysis of corpora
    • 5.1Identification of sentences with the four syntactic structures studied
      • 5.1.1Passive voice
      • 5.1.2Gerund
      • 5.1.3Present participle
      • 5.1.4Syntactic negation
    • 5.2Analysis and evaluation
  • 6.Results on extraction of syntactic structures and their comparison
    • 6.1Preprocessing
    • 6.2Passive voice
    • 6.3Gerund
    • 6.4Present participle
    • 6.5Syntactic negation
    • 6.6Comparison between syntactic structures
  • 7.Conclusion and future work
  • Notes
  • References
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