Choices of rhythmical patterns across academic and popular medical titles

Abstract

Rhythm can be perceived as a resource for empowering language through fostering message communication, during social exchanges, whether in written or spoken contexts (Fujii& Wan, 2014). Despite its prominent role in creating musicality (Mithen, 2009) and playing on the audience’s pathos, rhythm in written non-poetic genres and registers has received scant attention. For this reason, the present research attempts to study the rhythmical architecture in the medical register, with a particular emphasis on how it varies across two screening genres, namely academic medical titles (henceforth AMTs) and popular medical titles (henceforth PMTs) (Trosborg, 2000). To this end, a corpus of academic and popular medical titles, totaling 1127 words, is compiled. It is, then, annotated, using the UAM CorpusTool, for rhythmical patterns, following Griffin’s model (2016). On the one hand, the analysis has shown that genre determines rhythmical architecture in discourse, with more preference for alliteration, parallelism and repetition in PMTs than AMTs. On the other hand, the study has revealed that rhythmical patterns are more noticeable at the level of phonology than lexico-grammar. The findings of this study may help novice medical researchers and journalists write titles for their articles, in compliance with the generic conventions of the community they operate in.