The construal of trust through relevance. Patterns of evaluative language in medical writing

Medical writing, as an instance of academic discourse, is not just about conveying scientific findings but also about constructing authoritative personae. The intentional exploitation of linguistic resources plays a fundamental role in this ‘persuasive endeavour’ as emerges from a corpus of journal articles published online by medical researchers. This study seeks to explore the interpersonal dimension of medical writing by highlighting how these specific writers exploit linguistic resources and discourse devices to assume a stance and express judgements. It also examines how they position themselves within their scientific community as scholars capable of evaluating data as ‘relevant’ while asserting their trustworthiness and credibility.