The question of characterizing academic vocabulary has often been framed in a context that is purely determined by questions of language teaching. The aim in such approaches is to come up with a list of words for learners of English for Special Purposes. This book approaches this question from a more general, empirical perspective, focusing on medical vocabulary. Its main contention is that the characterization of medical vocabulary is much more complex than is suggested by a simple list. In a list, a threshold determines the borderline on a one-dimensional scale between what counts as medical.

• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
  • 2.1 Defining specialized vocabulary
  • 2.2 Three methods for delimiting specialized vocabulary
  • 2.3 Coxhead’s Academic Word List
  • 2.4 The Medical Academic Word List by Wang, Liang and Ge (2008)
  • 2.5 A New Academic Word List by Gardner and Davies (2013)
• Chapter Three
  • 3.1 The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
  • 3.2 The medical subcorpus in COCA
  • 3.3 ACAD
  • 3.4 Conclusion
• Chapter Four
  • 4.1 Methodology of an illustrative medical corpus design
  • 4.2 Distribution of nouns in WIMECO
  • 4.3 Distribution of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in WIMECO
  • 4.4 How useful are the two medical corpora?
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index