A syntactic perspective on rhetorical purpose: The example of if-conditionals in medical editorials

Abstract

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the functioning of if-conditionals in medical editorials (MEDs). As previous genre-based studies of medical discourse genres have shown, MEDs need to address at least three different types of readers and are thus a research-oriented, socio-political and praxis-oriented genre. Medical editorialists therefore need to customize their argumentative strategies in order to reach and convince these distinct readerships. Our aim is to adopt a syntactic perspective on rhetorical purpose, by focusing on a syntactic pattern which has a potentially important role to play in the construction of argument: the if-conditional. By examining the syntactic variants of the structure in MEDs we demonstrate the correspondence between seemingly minor constructional variants and the rhetorical aims of the genre in question. A comparison between the research article and MED usages moreover helps us to identify the form-function pairings specific to the editorials and in this way pinpoint how the if-conditional forms are used to serve the specific argument strategies of the MED genre.

Keywords

• if-conditionals
• medical editorials
• rhetorical purpose
• syntactic variants
• genre