A corpus based, lexical analysis of patient information for radiography

Despite the importance and the ubiquity of medical patient information in many healthcare systems in the world, we know very little about the lexical characteristics of the register. We do not know how patients perceive the information in the leaflets or whether the messages are transmitted effectively and fully understood. How a medical authority instructs and obliges patients in written information is also unclear. While the number of radiographic examinations performed globally increases year on year, studies consistently show that patients lack basic knowledge regarding the commonly-performed exams and show very poor understanding of the concomitant risks associated with radiation. There is, then, a pressing need to investigate radiography patient information in order to better understand why, and where, it is less effective. This thesis applies three approaches common to the field of corpus linguistics to uncover some of the lexical characteristics of patient information for radiography. The approaches used in this thesis are a keyword extraction, a lexical bundles analysis and an investigation of modal verbs used to express obligation. The findings suggest that patient information for radiography possesses characteristics more common to academic prose than conversation, although the high informational content of the register goes some way to explaining this and suggests that the reliance on these structures may, to a certain extent, be unavoidable. Results also suggest that the reliance on should to oblige and instruct is problematic as it may cause interpretation problems for certain patients, including those for whom English is not a primary language. Certain other characteristics of patient information revealed by the analyses may also cause comprehension, and while further research is needed, none of these characteristics would be evaluated as problematic by standard readability measures, furthering doubts about the suitability of such measures for the evaluation of medical information

Self-mention and uncertain communication in the British Medical Journal (1840\u20132007): The decrease of subjectivity uncertainty markers

The communication of a scientific finding as certain or uncertain largely determines whether that information will be translated into practice. In this study, a corpus of 80 articles published in the British Medical Journal for over 167 years (1840\u20132007) is analysed by focusing on three categories of uncertainty markers, which explicitly reveal a writer\u2019s subjectivity: (1) I/we epistemic verbs; (2) I/we modal verbs; and (3) epistemic non-verbs conveying personal opinions. The quantitative analysis shows their progressive decrease over time, which can be due to several variables, including the evolution of medical knowledge and practice, changes in medical research and within the scientific community, and more stringent guidelines for the scientific writing (regarding types of articles, their structure and rhetorical style)

How medical students express their attitudes towards their reflective experience in teaching hospitals: A corpus-based approach to the analysis of evaluation in reflective reports

Reflective practice is deemed as one of the essential learning tools in professional education, particularly in the field of Medicine. Educators have recognised the role of reflective writing in focusing students’ reflective learning (Moon, 2004). Research in this writing genre has highlighted the centrality of successful management of affective meanings to achieve critical reflection (Boud et al., 1985). However, the volume of studies that explored the structure and linguistic features of authorial attitudes is limited, indicating a lack of knowledge. This study investigates the macrostructure of reflective writing and the strategies used by writers to position their stance towards entities and propositions across the sections of the reports. To achieve this aim, a corpus of 47 reflective reports written by four-year medical students at the Birmingham Medical School was compiled and interviews with supervisors were conducted. Drawing on the appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005) and the parameter-based approach (Bednarek, 2006), a framework of evaluation was developed, featuring the analysis of the targets of the evaluation. The findings demonstrated the role of the situational context in selecting those targets, and the way writers position their stance towards them reflects their awareness of the genre conventions and their professional identity. They also revealed the influence the discourse community in structuring the reports. This thesis concludes with an evaluation of the framework and suggestions for pedagogical implications

Maurizio Gotti, Stefania Maci, Michele Sala (eds.), Insights into Medical Communication

Medical discourse is a multifaceted object of research. It has been the object of in-depth investigations from both a synchronic (Gotti & Salager-Meyer 2006) and diachronic (Taavitsainen & Pahta 2004, 2011) viewpoint. Thus, classic genres associated with traditional medical research (the research article, the abstract, letters to the editor, the conference presentation) and clinical practice (doctor-patient conversations, the referral letter) have generated a vast literature, often dominated ..

The Pandemic of Argumentation

This open access book addresses communicative aspects of the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as the epidemic of misinformation from the perspective of argumentation theory. Argumentation theory is uniquely placed to understand and account for the challenges of public reason as expressed through argumentative discourse. The book thus focuses on the extent to which the forms, norms and functions of public argumentation have changed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. This question is investigated along the three main research lines of the COST Action project CA 17132: European network for Argumentation and Public PoLicY analysis (APPLY): descriptive, normative, and prescriptive. The volume offers a broad range of contributions which treat argumentative phenomena that are directly related to the changes in public discourse in the wake of the outburst of COVID-19. The volume additionally places particular emphasis on expert argumentation, given (i) the importance expert discourse has had over the last two years, and (ii) the challenges that expert argumentation has faced in the public sphere as a result of scientific uncertainty and widespread misinformation. Contributions are divided into three groups, which (i) examine various features and aspects of public and institutional discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic, (ii) scrutinize the way health policies have been discussed, debated, attacked and defended in the public sphere, and (iii) consider a range of proposals meant to improve the quality of public discourse, and public deliberation in particular, in such a way that concrete proposals for argumentative literacy will be brought to light. Overall, this volume constitutes a timely inquiry into all things argumentative in pandemic discourse. This volume is of interest to a broad readership including philosophers, linguists, communication and legal scholars, and members of the wider public who seek to better understand the discourse surrounding communicative phenomena in times of crisis. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding organisation for research and innovation networks. For more information: www.cost.e

JURI SAYS:An Automatic Judgement Prediction System for the European Court of Human Rights

In this paper we present the web platform JURI SAYS that automatically predicts decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on communicated cases, which are published by the court early in the proceedings and are often available many years before the final decision is made. Our system therefore predicts future judgements of the court. The platform is available at jurisays.com and shows the predictions compared to the actual decisions of the court. It is automatically updated every month by including the prediction for the new cases. Additionally, the system highlights the sentences and paragraphs that are most important for the prediction (i.e. violation vs. no violation of human rights)

The Pandemic of Argumentation

This open access book addresses communicative aspects of the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as the epidemic of misinformation from the perspective of argumentation theory. Argumentation theory is uniquely placed to understand and account for the challenges of public reason as expressed through argumentative discourse. The book thus focuses on the extent to which the forms, norms and functions of public argumentation have changed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. This question is investigated along the three main research lines of the COST Action project CA 17132: European network for Argumentation and Public PoLicY analysis (APPLY): descriptive, normative, and prescriptive. The volume offers a broad range of contributions which treat argumentative phenomena that are directly related to the changes in public discourse in the wake of the outburst of COVID-19. The volume additionally places particular emphasis on expert argumentation, given (i) the importance expert discourse has had over the last two years, and (ii) the challenges that expert argumentation has faced in the public sphere as a result of scientific uncertainty and widespread misinformation. Contributions are divided into three groups, which (i) examine various features and aspects of public and institutional discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic, (ii) scrutinize the way health policies have been discussed, debated, attacked and defended in the public sphere, and (iii) consider a range of proposals meant to improve the quality of public discourse, and public deliberation in particular, in such a way that concrete proposals for argumentative literacy will be brought to light. Overall, this volume constitutes a timely inquiry into all things argumentative in pandemic discourse. This volume is of interest to a broad readership including philosophers, linguists, communication and legal scholars, and members of the wider public who seek to better understand the discourse surrounding communicative phenomena in times of crisis. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding organisation for research and innovation networks. For more information: www.cost.e

Spoken and embodied interaction in facilitated computer-supported workplace meetings

Almost 25 years ago, Clawson, Bostrom, and Anson (1993) drew attention to the fact that the ability to facilitate diverse human and technological interactions will be one of the most essential skills for leading and contributing to all levels of the organization in the future (p. 547). Today, there is an increased interest in studying facilitated meetings, wherein facilitation is most commonly understood as the process of helping groups work effectively to accomplish shared outcomes. Nevertheless, little of the existing research has provided empirically-grounded insights into the practice of facilitation. This thesis aims to close this gap by means of providing a detailed analysis of how facilitators go about doing facilitation work in facilitated computer-supported workplace meetings. The data comprise 53 hours of audio- and video-recorded multi-party interactions among facilitator(s) and participants, occurring during facilitated meetings in a business setting. The data were analysed using conversation analysis to examine the talk and embodied conduct of facilitators and meeting participants, as these unfold sequentially. The first analytic chapter reveals the macro-organization of the facilitated meetings, and it contrasts the practice view with the theoretical approach towards the organization of the facilitated meetings. The second analytic chapter investigates the interactional practices used by the facilitators to unpack participation that has already been elicited, captured, and displayed graphically on the public screen via the use of technology. In the third analytic chapter, I explore how the facilitators use computer software to build visual representations of the participants contributions. In the final analytic chapter, I investigate the practices of decision-making in meeting settings with multiple participants. Overall, this thesis makes innovative contributions to our understanding of the practice of facilitated computer-supported workplace meetings. It challenges existing literature on facilitation by finding that facilitators can orchestrate participant input, questioning the facilitator s role as content-neutral , as proposed by leading practitioners in the field of facilitation (e.g., Kaner et al., 2014). At the same time, it shows how the manipulation of computer software is an accountable action and how the decision-making process occasions or constrains the production of alignment between participant(s) and facilitator(s). The thesis also contributes to conversation analytic research on questioning, as well as the action of unpacking participation. I show that the notion that open-ended questions better elicit participation than interrogatives is generally not supported empirically, at least in this context. The thesis contributes to existing literature on multi-party meeting interaction, showing how the departure from the canonical next-speaker selection technique which involves the use of address terms and address positions in an utterance takes place. Further, it enhances our understanding of how computer software constrains and/or affords progressivity in interaction. In this sense, I enhance our understanding of the concept of agency of artefacts. Finally, I contribute to knowledge on group decision-making, an under-researched yet core activity in facilitated and other types of meetings. Here, I contribute to the body of work on the interplay between deontics and epistemics in interaction. This thesis shows the applicability of conversation analysis to the study of facilitation. By analysing talk and embodied conduct, communicative practices for accomplishing successful facilitated meetings are revealed and these should be of core interest to both professional and novice facilitators

Social construction of hand hygiene as a simple measure to prevent health care associated infection

The incidence of Heath Care Associated Infection is a major patient safety concern in the United Kingdom and reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with this has become a National Health Service priority. It is generally accepted that this objective will require a multi-factorial approach where infection prevention and control is seen as everybody’s business. However, some strategies receive greater exposure than others and hand hygiene is widely touted as a common sense solution to a complex problem. This discourse based study combined the techniques of Corpus Linguistics with Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the Textual, Discursive and Sociocultural features of hand hygiene discourse. This took place across three language domains, the Academy, the Newspaper Media and Organisational Policy Makers. These three cultural elites take a consistent account of the problem and the solution. Broadly hand hygiene is portrayed as effective, compliance is basic, performance is poor and Health Care Workers should be held to account through zero tolerance policies and if necessary disciplinary action. However, not only does this background the messy, contextual factors of implementing a hand hygiene policy it imposes a one size fits all approach and measurement programme on compliance that hides the true nature of performance and this ultimately impacts on patient care. This study calls for junior clinicians for whom policy has the greatest impact to become more engaged in the policy making process. In a spirit of openness trusts should adopt linguistic devices that recognise the dynamic nature of practice and a more educational, sophisticated approach to audit

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N