Patterns of Use of English Synonymous Medical Terms: the Case of Disease and Illness. A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

It often happens that terms defined by dictionaries as synonyms have different patterns of use. An example of this phenomenon is represented by the terminological pair disease/illness in medical discourse. The behaviour of these commonly used terms will be an object of discussion in this study. The work is divided into two main sections. The first part takes into account the information included in conventional dictionaries, both bilingual and monolingual, generic and specialized, in order to see if the terms in question are described as perfectly interchangeable or as having different uses depending on the context. Some dictionaries highlight the use, both specific and generic, respectively of disease and illness, but limited information about frequency, collocational and contextual preferences is provided. The second part of the work is represented by two corpus-based studies. In the first corpus, made up of 30 research article texts, the frequency of disease and illness, as well as collocates and patterns of use, are investigated. In the second additional corpus, made up of other 20 research articles texts, the aim of the analysis is to find out if an association exists between the use of disease and contexts where specific pathological conditions are dealt with, and between illness and contexts having pathological conditions in general as a subject. The work intends to draw attention to the enormous resources that corpus linguistics can offer to lexicographic research.