Surgical terminological units: structure, meaning, distribution

Abstract

The article focuses on a crucial human-related issue of nominating surgical interventions. The authors dwell upon the terms of cardiovascular manipulations and lower limb amputation. Medical terminology is of primary significance to both professionals and non-medical subjects due to its vital nature. Given the prevalence of current anthropocentric research works, this study is relevant. The relevance is further supported by a set of approaches to the surgical terminology followed in the study, in particular, semantic, structural, contextual analysis as well as the tools of online and offline text processing. The complexity and sophistication of the surgical discourse requires detailed and multifaceted analysis for their meaning and contextual use clarification. The article aims at revealing the semantic and structural specifics of the surgical terms based on medical written and spoken texts. The research rested on approximately 200 terminological units retrieved from the texts of a surgical Handbook and surgical manipulation video scripts. The work was performed in four stages. The analysis revealed that structurally, nominal word combinations prevail over verbal ones. The most frequent verbal meanings are ‘to open’, ‘to close’, ‘to introduce’, ‘to remove’, ‘to connect’ and ‘to find’. The semantic classification of the terms revealed that the stages of surgery, anatomical structures and instruments are nominated more frequently. The concordance lines generated by the AntConc tool for the key terms provided vivid representation of their contextual functions, features and collocations with body parts, body systems, and implementation methods.