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

Abstract

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 writer’s linguistic background.