Existential indicators in medical research papers
This study investigates the role of existentials in the construction of medical knowledge
and how they manoeuvre argumentation in scientific research papers. Corpus analysis
reveals that some grammatical environments appear to be chosen on epistemological
grounds since they are frequently employed in medical writing to encode and disseminate
evidence-based information. Thanks to their semantics, existentials form a privileged
environment in which to tackle medical discourse from a quantitative angle, especially
as quantification represents one of the techniques of objectification characteristic of
scientific writing. On the strength of their quantificational import, existentials, as they
present themselves throughout a medical paper, can bring inherently argumentative
intentions to the surface since they are used to justify the validity of the claims made by
the authors of a clinical study.