Comparison of Guyton's Physiological Texts and Persian for Medical Purposes: A Corpus-based Analysis

Comparative study and analysis of educational texts leads us to a more accurate understanding of their characteristics. In this regard, the present study aims to answer the question that whether there are the differences between the textbooks which are specially designed for the non-Iranian Persian learners in advanced courses and those medical texts which are taught at the first semester of the academic year. Doing so, the texts were analyzed and compared with regard to the grammatical metaphor, ranked and rank-shifted components at the level of the clause and clause complex, and so on. In the course of the research, a corpus consisting of 9886 words extracted from the textbooks of the of medical sciences texts for Persian learners and 9775 words from the Guyton's physiology texts were selected and analyzed. Then, each of the linguistic features was individually identified and extracted in the framework of systemic-functional grammar of Halliday. Afterwards, using appropriate software, data were collected, categorized and summarized. The research results confirmed the hypothesis of the research stating that there was a significant difference between the texts of medical sciences for Persian learners and the medical texts for the first semester of the academic year. In addition, the in-depth analysis showed that, in general, there were similarities between the two parts of the structure with regards to characteristics such as ranking, rank-shifting, and ideational grammatical metaphor. In addition, there existed some differences between the order of non-finite rank-shifting and the number of patterns as well as in the logical-semantic relations between the dependent clauses. It seems that the factors of the research can be used to examine the various aspects of similarities and differences of various texts.