Setting up a Corpus-based Study of Hedging in Spanish Research Articles: Creating a Valid Corpus

Abstract

This paper presents the steps and rationale followed in creating a Spanish corpus of biomedical research articles, comparable to the ones used to study genre patterns in English language biomedical research papers, such as that used by Salager-Meyer in 1994 to study hedging in English medical discourse. Salager-Meyer’s corpus was taken as the preliminary model. It consisted of 5 research papers (RP) and 10 case reports (CR) from five high impact factor journals in English. In the Spanish corpus, twenty articles from the same two medical genres and from six different Spanish scientific journals in biomedicine were carefully selected. This paper gives a detailed description of the steps taken in the process, as well as the relevant changes in the selection criteria for the Spanish corpus.