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[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.Carrió Pastor, ML. (2016). Mitigation of claims in medical research papers: A comparative study of English and Spanish writers. Communication and Medicine. 13(3):249-261. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/80668S24926113
