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The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to identify the evaluative speech acts, either positive or negative, contained in a corpus of 30 English-written medical book reviews published in The British Medical Journal in the period 2000-2009; 2) to analyze the linguistic-rhetorical strategies used to convey this evaluation. Our main results illustrate that various mitigating strategies are used not only to soften criticism, but also to help maintain social harmony and solidarity with the reviewees. Moreover, negative evaluation is on many occasions voiced at aspects outside the book reviewed, which would mean that apart from showing their expertise in the field tackled, book reviewers also want to discuss certain issues of their concern and to put forward their cultural background.Este trabajo tiene dos objetivos: 1) identificar los actos de habla evaluativos, positivos y negativos, en un corpus de reseñas de 30 libros médicos escritas en inglés y publicadas en el British Medical Journal en el periodo 2000- 2009; 2) analizar las estrategias lingüístico-retóricas utilizadas para transmitir estos actos de habla. Nuestros resultados principales muestran que no sólo se utilizan diversos mecanismos lingüístico-retóricos para atenuar los actos críticos, sino también para ayudar a mantener un clima de armonía social y solidaridad con los autores de los libros reseñados. Además, la evaluación negativa se dirige en numerosas ocasiones a aspectos ajenos a los libros reseñados, lo que implica que aparte de mostrar su competencia en el campo abordado, los reseñadores también desean debatir determinados temas de su interés y hacer gala de su cultural general.

With medicine having a long, more than 2500-year-old history, it seems obvious that different nations must have contributed to its development, which has been accompanied by the creation of the terminology necessary to describe the discoveries made and to express the concepts that evolved in the course of this development. From the point of view of their linguistic origin, medical terms may have been built by applying the rules of their own code (the language of medicine), by borrowing words from other sub-codes (the language of computer science or statistics), or by borrowing words from foreign languages. This study analyses the third type of borrowings, i.e. words adopted from other cultures through medical English.

This study addresses the issue of academic conflict (AC) in four different genres of medical discourse, viz., editorials, review and research papers and case reports. The rhetorical strategies used to convey AC were recorded and their qualitative features (their level of commitment or detachment, their overall tone, the presence of irony, sarcasm, etc.) were analyzed in 40 medical articles written in Spanish in the last decade of the 20th century. Our results show that the communicative function of each genre and the rank/status power relations that exist between authors and their audience have a direct bearing on the way medical researchers express their dissension.

Uno de los rasgos más característicos del lenguaje de las ciencias de la salud es la presencia de epónimos o términos construidos sobre nombres propios. En nuestro trabajo hemos examinado esta clase de expresiones con el propósito de proponer su inclusión en los programas de LFM (Lenguas para Fines Médicos). Con ese fin, hemos analizado varios diccionarios médicos en diversas lenguas, y nos hemos fijado un doble objetivo: 1) relacionar las formas más representativas de la aparición eponímica; 2) llevar a cabo una comparación entre las lenguas consideradas. Nuestro análisis ha puesto de relieve que la variación, tanto conceptual como formal, es una característica inherente a la formación eponímica, no sólo entre lenguas diferentes sino también en el seno de una misma lengua, y que, una vez acuñados, los epónimos se comportan como cualquier otro signo lingüístico, estando por tanto sujetos a fenómenos de homonimia, polisemia y sinonimia.

This paper is a diachronic analysis of a corpus of 180 titles drawn from CRs published in the BMJ and the BMJ Case Reports between 1840 and 2009. The frequency of occurrence of 69 variables (e.g. title type and length, punctuation, grammatical and syntactic data, number of authors and collaboration practices) was recorded for each title. The corpus was divided into three blocks (1840-1850, 1920-1930 and 2009) and between-block comparisons were carried out. Our findings show that CR titles have evolved over the 160-year period studied in the sense that they have increased in length, syntactic complexity, semantic richness and title type diversity. Authorship patterns and collaboration practices have changed, too. Although internationalization of case reporting has increased over time, today’s preferred practice is still local collaboration. The only variable that has remained constant over the years is the nominal nature of CR titles. We put forth several social and scientific factors that could account for the various shifts observed. The non-informativeness of CR titles that persisted over time can be explained by the fact that CR authors are reluctant to give a generalization flavor to their findings based on single cases. ********** ERRATUM In this article, an error was subsequently identified in Footnote 1. This error concerns acknowledgement of funding information. The corrected text is now included beow: 1 This research was supported by Grant N° M-1039-13-06-B from the University of The Andes Research Center. Correction added on 23 February 2015, after online publication in November, 2013.