Contrastive study of verbal structures in medical and general corpora in French

Summary This study examines the syntactic features of French medical and general texts to clarify their complexity and implications for comprehension. By analysing corpora from both domains, we found significant differences in the use of passive voice, present participles, negation and gerund constructions. In medical texts, the passive voice and present participles are more frequent, reflecting specialized discourse and precision. In contrast, negation and gerunds are more common in general texts, emphasizing the diversity of syntactic structures, and specific stylistic and argumentative effects. Our findings underline the need for clear communication in medical texts and provide empirical evidence for the simplification.