Semantic Sequences and the Pragmatics of Medical Research Article Writing

In today’s medical profession, there is increasing recognition that doctors should develop clinical as well as research-oriented skills. In this respect, the medical discourse community demands that they become ever more active members of the discipline in both doing and writing about the research they undertake. This may request that doctors acquire sound knowledge of the relationship between the discourse structures of the discipline and its underlying epistemology. It is within such an educational setting that specialised corpora deserve to be acknowledged as a source of significant insights to socialise medical students along with practitioners into the distinctive communicative practices of scientific communities. The aim of this study is to focus on semantic sequences, defined by Hunston (2008: 271) as “recurring sequences of words or phrases […] more usefully characterized as sequences of meaning elements rather than as formal sequences”. Sequences are analysed here as a clue to the main aspects related to the presentation and discussion of research findings in specialised journals. In particular, they were studied on the basis of a corpus of authentic research articles, the genre with the lion’s share in specialised medico-scientific knowledge dissemination.