Medical Linguistics
Abstract
Linguistics, in general, is the basic science of all language studies. It is concerned
with the nature and structure of language and with the role it plays
in human communication. Medical linguistics uses some methods of general
linguistics and also creates additional ones. This is motivated by the following
practical needs:
Computer-aided data record, storage, and retrieval in medical practice
and research require that medical data be stored in such a manner that enables
their computational processing. However, databases written in natural
medical language cannot be easily processed. To enable efficient natural language
processing, medical terms and sentences used in them must be made
amenable to syntactic and semantic operations by computer programs. Medical
linguistics is an ill-defined, interdisciplinary branch of medical informatics
and medical information and library sciences concerned with methods and
problems of natural language processing in medicine.