Negation in biomedical English
It seems intuitively certain that in scientific articles, affirmative clauses far surpass negative clauses. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that there are few negative sentences in this type of written discourse. The aim of this article is to analyse negative polarity in biomedical English. By linking discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, it studies how negative polarity and the scope of negation in combination with discourse connectors can bring about systematic patterns in biomedical discourse. The analysis of the context, position in the clause and text distribution of some adjectives that appear in the negative in the data under analysis reveals how different rhetorical devices, such as hedging and polarity, contribute to the rhetorical weight of the multiword expressions selected in this study.