A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Collocational Behavior of the Nouns Deformity and Malformation in Medical English

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of some aspects of the collocational behavior of the nouns deformity and malformation in the context of English for Medical Purposes (EMP). The aim was to determine which nominal and adjectival lexical items denoting or relating to the category of human body parts the two nouns exclusively or predominantly collocate with within three different patterns, namely ‘modifiers of deformity/malformation’, ‘deformity/malformation of’, and ‘deformity/malformation in’ in the English Web Corpus 2015 available in the Sketch Engine software. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collocational information retrieved from all three patterns indicate that, despite the fact that there are collocates common to both deformity and malformation, deformity tends to co-occur with nominal and adjectival lexical items which denote or are related to parts of the human musculoskeletal system and the hard(-tissue) structures, while malformation has a tendency to co-occur with nouns or noun phrases and adjectives denoting or relating to (parts of) the internal organs of the human body and its soft(-tissue) structures. The paper also offers some pedagogical implications for EMP teaching and learning.