English Secondary-Predicative Structures in Medical Discourse: On the Problem of Classification

Abstract

English secondary-predicative structures have been sufficiently studied within various paradigms and approaches. Nevertheless, research on this phenomenon is still relevant at the intersection of grammar and discourse as a cognitive phenomenon related to the creation, operation and transmission of knowledge. From this point of view, the semi-complex sentence with secondary-predicative structures is seen as a reflection of cognitive processing of knowledge and its integration to create new knowledge. The aim of this paper is to identify the peculiarities of English secondary-predicative structures in medical discourse and to classify them according to their cognitive characteristics and key parameters of medical discourse (in particular, the chronotope). The material of the study is a corpus of English semi-complex sentences with secondary-predicative structures extracted by means of continuous sampling from texts representing various written genres of medical discourse. The research methodology is based on the integrative approach and includes both linguistic methods (linguistic analysis, transformational analysis, etc.) and methods involving the application of artificial intelligence (e.g. word cloud automatic keyword extraction). The cognitive basis for choosing secondary-predicative structures is the conceptual integration between the proposition represented by the secondary-predicative structure and the proposition represented by the matrix sentence, as well as the characteristics of the medical discourse chronotope. In addition, a subclassification of secondary-predicative structures by the intensity of representation of the medical discourse chronotope is proposed.