Corpora: Clinical English

[David Lee]

It's not entirely clear if it's only spoken 'clinical dialogues' which are
required or both written and spoken 'clinical English'. If it's the former,
then look no further than the British National Corpus, which has 119 files
of spoken medical consultations (transcribed doctor-patient dialogues)
totalling some 85,620 words. These files may be found by searching for
'medical consultation' in the titles of the files (e.g. in the BNC
bibliography). (I'm not entirely sure, however, if doctors in China ought to
be learning the culturally-specific expressions used by British doctors in
(informal? semi-formal?) consultations with British patients, but that's a
different matter.)

Incidentally, I hope to announce soon to the List a new resource for finding
out what's in the BNC. I'm putting the finishing touches to a user-friendly
(i.e. no abstruse codes) spreadsheet/database containing most of the useful
BNC header *and* bibliographical information for all the files, plus a
preliminary classification of all the files into *genres* (or 'register' in
some cases). These genre labels are much more fine-grained than the present
BNC 'domains' and will thus (I hope) be more illuminating and useful for
researchers wanting to get a preliminary idea of what kinds of text may be
found in the BNC or how to restrict their searches.  More later.


David Lee.

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David Lee                    **************************
Dept of Linguistics        *   Stop the narrowing of minds   *
Lancaster University     *   Affirm the diversity of life        *
Lancaster LA1 4YT     **************************
England, UK.
Tel (H): (01524) 848 644
    (O): (01524) 65201 ext. 93212

Email: david_lee00 at hotmail.com
Homepage: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/leey/dave.htm
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Granger Sylviane" <granger at lige.ucl.ac.be>
To: <corpora at hd.uib.no>
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 6:37 AM
Subject: Corpora: Clinical English


Dear all,

I have just received the following request. Could anyone help?

Many thanks!
Sylviane Granger
---------------------------------------------------
>>Dear Prof. Granger:
>>
>>I am a teacher of English in Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese
>>Medicine. In our university, there is a great need for teachers to learn
>>clinical English.
>>
>>I am writing a book on clinical dialogues between doctors and patients.
>>There are many expressions I am not sure. Is it possible to get some
>>help from your corpus?
>>
>>If it is possible, what should I do? If it is not possible, where can I
>>get the help?
>>
>>Thank you for reading the letter. Happy New Year!
>>
>>Shi Yunzhong
>>
>>Associate Professor