Constructing Scholarly Ethos in Non-mainstream Medical Research Writing: Discursive and Linguistic Strategies

At a time when mainstream, biomedical research and practice continue to frame the discourse about health, non-mainstream, or alternative/complementary medical research is now gaining ground in some academic publishing venues. While non-mainstream researchers are likely to work twice as hard to survive on a very uneven playing field, they must also develop rational appeals to believability in order to be persuasive in their own writing. In this chapter, I set out to explore the discursive and linguistic strategies employed by alternative/complementary medicine scholars to see how and to what extent they convey a scholarly ethos that entails building their own authority, credibility, and expertise and recognizing the values of their academic community. Taking a corpus-driven approach to academic articles in this field, I look at how authors project themselves and their work and persuade their audience about their arguments and perspectives in this form of writing. To do so, I rely on the cover term of evaluation in academic discourse analytical research to examine stance-making resources for their linguistic realization in both quantitative and qualitative terms and to identify the attendant meanings for interaction and persuasion that establish the writers’ ethos on the topics they discuss. Conclusions are drawn about the relevance of such findings for discourse activities enacted by the non-mainstream academic community.