Productivité à travers domaines et genres : dérivés adjectivaux et langue médicale

Abstract

Natalia Grabar & Pierre Zweigenbaum : Productivity through domains and genres: derived adjectives and medical language The productivity of a morphological process generally varies with the type of corpus on which it is observed. Taking as a case study a set of morphological processes of denominal adjectivation, we examine the variation of their productivity with domain and genre. We illustrate this variation on (medical) domain-specific corpora, studying on the one hand their internal oppositions and on the other hand their contrast with an external, large-audience press corpus (Le Monde newspaper). Within a medical specialty, we also examine productivity variation with text genre, between patient discharge summaries and Web sites. This paper describes the design and construction of study corpora, the method for compiling derived adjectives, and the computation of various statistics on these adjectives, -ique derivation is the most frequent adjectivation process in all corpora. It is more productive, in the Baayen sense, in the medical corpus than in the press corpus, as are -el and -al. Productivity differences are also observed between medical specialties among patient discharge summaries, but much less among Web documents. Finally, a few contrasts can be found, in a given medical specialty, between discharge summaries and Web documents.