A Cognitive Linguistics Approach to the Discourse of Drug Information for Experts and Patients

The aim of this paper is to explore in greater detail the cognitive processes underlying the medical discourse used in written drug information for medical specialists and patients. Starting from a case study based on documents in English issued by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) we will provide some insights into the ways how drug-related issues such as the administration, use and possible side effects of drugs are conceptualized and linguistically encoded in an expert vs. non-expert setting. Despite substantial differences in terms of content and wording (X) the text types under investigation are very similar in terms of text function and structure. Both represent pragmatic texts designed to accurately convey procedural information in order to help experts and patients to make informed decisions about a drug’s therapeutic use (Wright 1999, 85; Dickinson 2003). In the case of the expert-oriented Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC) this is achieved by using specialized language, in the case of the patient leaflet (PL) by presenting the expert knowledge in a re-conceptualized format conform to the patients’ background knowledge, linguistic skills, needs and expectations. We will focus on examples which illustrate the impact of the experienced world on the specialist vs. non-specialist conceptualization and linguistic encoding of drug-related knowledge in both text types. The analysis will be carried out on different linguistic levels in order to account for pragmatic, lexical, syntactic, and stylistic phenomena associated with the setting-specific coding of specialized knowledge. Hereby, the role of contextual information in the representation of specialized knowledge units in PL’s will be an important aspect as well. Using Cognitive Linguistics, and more particularly, Frame-based Terminology (Faber et al. 2006, 2007) and Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982, 2006; Fillmore and Atkins 1998) as a methodological framework this investigation leads to results that should demonstrate the usefulness of a conceptually driven approach to the study of specialized and popularized functional medical texts.

ISBN:1-4438-5515-4

Jaar van publicatie:2017