Alessandra VICENTINI, Kim GREGO
University of Insubria - University of Milan

Toward A Dictionary of Bioethics Terms

The project "Ethical, ideological and emotional aspects of English medical discourse", started in November 2006 by a joint research group involving the Universities of Milan and Insubria (Varese), will come to an end in October 2010. As both a result and a development of this four-year investigation, a new, long-term research project is under way, aimed at eventually producing a Dictionary of Bioethics Terms.  

The above is in light of the recent extensive research conducted on medical-scientific communication and medical English both as a research field and as a linguistic tool. An area of investigation not only proving to be valuable from the viewpoint of academic study, but also from an applicative stance in those professional and institutional settings where the doctor-patient relationship is at issue.

In one such context, ethics – intended as that discipline both providing guidelines for practical behaviour in debated and controversial issues and allowing users/patients to access basic information about the subject they wish to learn about in a plain and simple format – plays a pivotal role, being interwoven as it is with communication, language and linguistic concerns.

In the wake of the latest developments imposed by the affirmation of the Internet as a reliable source even in the field of scientific terminology (Medline Plus, NHS A-Z), with a view to dissemination not only at non-expert level, but also at professional level, this paper intends to present the background of the research and the plan of the work, laying out the methodological framework, the corpus and the target user groups.

In particular, the wordlists of already existing dictionaries on ethics, bioethics and medical ethics will be firstly compared; secondly, general criteria of selection of potential headwords will be considered, paying attention to the prospective users and uses of a dictionary of this kind.

In order to establish the degree of acceptance and representativeness of the lexemes taken into account, the occurrence of some sample items in a corpus of written English will then be presented and discussed. Such a corpus is made up of the following digitalised texts: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Code of Medical Ethics, Declaration of Geneva and Helsinki Declaration – the four pillars of contemporary (medical) ethics.

It is finally suggested that corpora and IT tools should be exploited to develop statistically reliable criteria of inclusion or exclusion for possible ethical terms and to decide on their eligibility for a Dictionary of Bioethics Terms, in English, addressed to an audience of potential users from settings varying along both the horizontal (domain-specific) and the vertical (specialized to non-specialized) axes.　

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