The Role of Passive Voice in Hedging Medical Discourse: a Corpus-based Study on English and Spanish Research Articles

The appropriate use of hedging in scientific discourse is a vital skill for writers presenting their knowledge in an academic discourse community and much work has therefore been done on this relevant feature, especially on its use in the rhetoric of specialized texts in English. Some authors believe that there are considerable differences in styles of writing in particular cultures (e.g., see Connor and Kaplan 1987, Mauranen 1993b and Valero-Garcés 1996). But not until very recently and mainly as a result of the growing interest in contrastive rhetoric has Spanish language been studied as well. In this paper I will examine the range of expressions in English and Spanish medical research articles that are commonly known as hedging. Although hedging typical realisation might be considered to be the modal verb forms, they are not the only devices available. In our research, we have also considered the role of passive voice in modulating specialized discourse.This study based on a corpus of 10 Research Papers (RP) in English and 10 RP and 10 Case Reports (CR) in Spanish sets out to find reasons behind the existence of a wide range of hedging realisations. Drawing upon Swales (1990) genre analysis framework, it will be shown that hedging features are related to linguistic forms through functional and conventional associations. Thus, showing the factors influencing the choice of expression we will explain the meanings conveyed by each realisation and expose the similarities and differences between Spanish and English hedging devices in medical research papers.