专门用途英语词汇语义共选特色探究

Semantic Co-selection among Words in English for Specific Purposes

本文以医学英语为例,参照语料库语言学的共选理论及研究方法、以关键词作为切入点来探究专门用途英语的词汇语义共选特色。研究基于对比自建百万词次医学英语语料库与英语国家语料库而生成的前500医学英语关键词,先后进行了关键词语义范畴分类以及各类关键词样品的语境共选词的语义偏好分析。结果发现关键词的显著性高频搭配词的语义分类与关键词自身的语义范畴分类高度重合;而且医学关键词的搭配词语义偏好与这些关键词在普通英语环境下的搭配语义偏好也有明显差异,由此凸显医学专业独特的词汇语义共选特色。以上发现虽然仅具倾向性,但对于专门用途英语的词汇教学和词典编纂仍有重要启示。

The current study explores semantic co-selection among words in English for specific purposes from a perspective of co-selectiv 500-key-word list in the eness, focusing on semantic preference of key words in English for Medical purposes. A medical environment was created by comparing a self-established English for Medical Pur- poses corpus with the British National Corpus（BNC）. These 500 key words were subdivided into 5 meaning catego- ries, and the semantic preferences of the representative words from each category was investigated. The study pres- ents word groups with semantic similarity which are found to regularly collocate with these representative key words in the medical environment. We also find words in the medical environment have semantic preferences unique to medical world, which are highly consistent with 5 meaning categories of key words. The research also notices that these preferences often represent strong tendencies for lexical relations, rather than a firmly fixed relationship. The research findings have implications for vocabulary teaching and dictionary compilation as well.