A Critical Discourse Analysis of Stomach Cancer: Comparing Medical Research Articles and International Medical Associations

Abstract

This study presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of stomach cancer information as it appears in twenty peer-reviewed medical research articles and the publicly accessible discourses of five internationally recognised medical associations. It is argued, following Fairclough's (2015) three-dimensional CDA framework and van Dijk's (1980) macro-semantic rules, that the discourses produced by medical associations systematically diverge from the empirical findings reported in academic literature, with potentially significant consequences for public health literacy. The study adopts a qualitative analytical approach, employing Hallidayan transitivity analysis (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) and Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal framework to examine ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions across the two corpora. The findings indicate that medical associations tend to employ generalisation and deletion as dominant discourse techniques, thereby presenting imprecise and arguably incomplete information regarding the causes and treatment recommendations for stomach cancer. In contrast, the selected research articles are found to rely predominantly on identifying relational processes and factual monoglossic clauses, which it is suggested, facilitate a more transparent and evidence-grounded representation of the disease. Furthermore, lexical chain analysis reveals considerable discrepancies between the collocational patterns deployed in academic articles and those utilised in association discourse. It is concluded that these linguistic asymmetries are not incidental but are arguably shaped by institutional ideological positions. The pedagogical and policy-level implications of these findings are also discussed, with particular reference to the need for evidence-aligned public health communication in the context of global cancer discourse.