ENGLISH IN CROATIAN SCIENTIFIC MEDICAL DISCOURSE: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

English as a lingua franca is a part of the more general phenomenon of “English as an international language”. Its influence on other languages, Croatian being one of them, is evident across different functional styles. This study presents findings from a corpus-based qualitative and quantitative analysis of anglicisms and English words on the lexical level, and the passive, light verbs and noun compounds on the syntactic level. The corpus, consisting of texts published in four journals, Acta Stomatologica Croatica, Gynaecologia et Perinatologia, Medicina Fluminensis and Paediatria Croatica, is based on the introductory parts of the papers. The results indicate that the influence of English is most evident on the lexical level – 1.55% of all words are anglicisms. On the syntactic level, the use of noun compounds is significant.