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Swedification patterns of Latin and Greek affixes in clinical text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Gintarė Grigonytė ,
Maria Kvist ,
Mats Wirén ,
Sumithra Velupillai  and
Aron Henriksson
Gintarė Grigonytė
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. gintare@ling.su.se
Maria Kvist
Affiliation:
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Postbox 7003, 164 07 Kista, Sweden. maria.kvist@karolinska.se
Mats Wirén
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. mats.wiren@ling.su.se
Sumithra Velupillai
Affiliation:
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Postbox 7003, 164 07 Kista, Sweden. sumithra@dsv.su.se
Aron Henriksson
Affiliation:
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Postbox 7003, 164 07 Kista, Sweden. aronhen@dsv.su.se
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Abstract

Swedish medical language is rich with Latin and Greek terminology which has undergone a Swedification since the 1980s. However, many original expressions are still used by clinical professionals. The goal of this study is to obtain precise quantitative measures of how the foreign terminology is manifested in Swedish clinical text. To this end, we explore the use of Latin and Greek affixes in Swedish medical texts in three genres: clinical text, scientific medical text and online medical information for laypersons. More specifically, we use frequency lists derived from tokenised Swedish medical corpora in the three domains, and extract word pairs belonging to types that display both the original and Swedified spellings. We describe six distinct patterns explaining the variation in the usage of Latin and Greek affixes in clinical text. The results show that to a large extent affixes in clinical text are Swedified and that prefixes are used more conservatively than suffixes.

Keywords

affixesclinical textcorpus linguisticshealth recordsLatin and Greek terminology
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , May 2016 , pp. 5 - 37
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Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2016 

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