Mitigation of claims in medical research papers: A comparative study of English and Spanish writers

[EN] This study identifies variation in the use of mitigation devices in medical written English between authors with English as their first language and those with Spanish as their first language. A corpus of 30 medical research papers written in English and published in international journals was compiled, 15 by researchers with Spanish as their first language and 15 by native English-speakers, and this was compared with a second corpus of 15 medical papers written in Spanish. By a comparative analysis of how mitigation devices were used in both corpora, it was possible to establish whether their frequency and the rhetorical strategies adopted varied depending on the writers’ linguistic background.

Since its inception in 2004, Communication & Medicine has been consistently interrogating the black box’ of what is routinely characterised as the communicative turn’ in healthcare practice in clinical and public health domains. It is now firmly established as a leading forum for these critical debates