The English data show that the most prevalent elastic expression is may, which occurs 10 times more than the least frequent, sometimes. The second highest, some, occurs four times more than sometimes. This indicates that may is far more a favoured choice of word than the other nine words on the top-10 words list, underlined by the fact that medical information is a matter of probability rather than being categorical.

Quite a few elastic terms on the Chinese top-10 list are similar to their English counterparts or near-counterparts: keneng (可能) and may; chang (常)/tongchang (通常) and usually/often; hen (很) and very; geng (更) and more; duo (多)/xuduo (許多) and many/most. These cover epistemic, scalar and approximate stretchers. While the most frequently used general stretcher in Chinese is deng, the most commonly used general stretcher in English is things. In terms of how the four categories of EL are distributed, the Chinese and the English data exhibit two different patterns, i.e., SC-AQ-GE-EP and EP-AQ-SC-GE respectively. A series of comparisons of the most-used stretchers of each of the four categories in the Chinese and the English corpora yield some interesting findings. There is a clear preferred epistemic stretcher in online health information in Chinese and in English respectively, i.e. keneng (可能) and may.

There appears to be a combination of contributing factors that affect and shape the use of EL in the Chinese data: the nature of the medical condition (e.g. disease severity, sensitivity of mental conditions), the applications and restrictions of medicine (e.g. the groups suitable or unsuitable for vaccines), the society’s health policy (e.g. the groups eligible for free treatment), the written mode, the health professional’s stance towards the health information, and potentials and constraints of an elastic/vague term (e.g. keneng vs. sihu; hen vs. guodu). Social conventions in language use are also a significant factor, an issue that is further addressed in Chapter 6.