Medical Academic Speech. A Corpus-based Investigation of Same-Speaker Most Frequent Content Key Word Repetition in Non-Native English Discourse

Abstract

Studies on repetition in ELF interactions have been carried out in several domains, but medical academic discourse still remains under-researched. This paper explores same-speaker repetition in a 31,153-word corpus of lectures included in the 100,135-word medical section of the 1 million-word ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) corpus. More specifi cally, the corpus was searched for the most frequent same-speaker content key word repetition and corresponding functions, with both immediate and delayed repetition being scrutinized. The results confi rmed the initial hypothesis according to which same-speaker repetition was expected to be pervasive in the data, not only as a result of the pedagogical nature of the encounters but also as a possible consequence of the ELF linguistic context. To this purpose, the data in the ELFA medical corpus were compared to those explored in a corpus of medical lectures from the NS (Native Speaker) BASE (British Academic Corpus of Spoken English) corpus. Most frequent same-speaker content key word repetition occurred in the ELFA data twice and a half as much as in the BASE data on average considering relative frequencies. No differences were found as for repetition use, which mostly displayed explicating and emphasizing functions in both corpora. Occurrence of extra repetition in the ELFA data as compared to the BASE data shows the need for high levels of clarity in communicative contexts where interactions take place between speakers of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.