Register Variation Across English Pharmaceutical Texts: A Corpus-driven Study of Keywords, Lexical Bundles and Phrase Frames in Patient Information Leaflets and Summaries of Product Characteristics

Abstract

This study constitutes an initial step towards filling a gap in corpus linguistics studies of linguistic and phraseological variation across English pharmaceutical texts, in particular in terms of recurrent linguistic patterns. The study conducted from a register- perspective (Biber & Conrad, 2009), which employs both quantitative and qualitative research procedures, aims to provide a corpus-driven description of vocabulary and phraseology, namely key words, lexical bundles, and phrase frames, used in patient information leaflets and summaries of product characteristics (represented by 463 and 146 texts, respectively) written originally in English and collected in two domain-specific custom-designed corpora. The analysis is largely based on the methodology proposed by Biber (2006, 2009), Goźdź-Roszkowski (2011) and Roemer (2009), which enables one to explore the lexico- phraseological profile of two text types and the functions of keywords, lexical bundles and phrase frames found therein, thus providing new data for a description of English used for pharmaceutical purposes. The results show that patterns of language use differ across two text types, and that the observed differences are linked with the situational and functional characteristics of patient information leaflets and summaries of product characteristics. Thus, the results show that pattern variability is not only content-related (Roemer, 2009), but also function-related. It is hoped that the results may have significant implications, in particular as regards teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP), translators’ training or lexicography, to name just a few.