Prescription drug brand Web sites: Guidance where none exists

This paper applies insights from linguistics and discourse analysis to prescription drug brand Web sites, with special reference to the 100 top-selling drugs. Such sites give the outward appearance of being a place to go for straightforward information about a specific brand. In reality, they present a confused mix of brand information, health information and hype, muddled organization, and poor indication of authority, creating an imbalance between benefit and risk content. In so doing, they breach the letter and spirit of the regulations governing direct-to-consumer advertising, which the FDA has by default applied to such Web sites but which were not designed for this special type of discourse. The many communicative difficulties proven to be caused by Web sites in general, in particular for the elderly and less literate, also pose ethical problems. A rethinking of the verbal and visual design of these drug sites is needed -- and new regulatory guidance, for which this paper offers recommendations. At stake is not just the quality of health information at brand drug sites but also their credibility

A generative study of peripheral categories in modern Hebrew.

We apply generative techniques to Modern Hebrew peripheral categories - a term more accurate, to our mind, than the traditional "adverbial". We focus on three aspects that we consider particularly- suited to three descriptive devices forming part of a uniform theory of syntax; base rules, transformations and rules of semantic interpretation. First we attempt to state the expansions of peripheral categories in the base, within an interpretive framework as in Jackendoff (1972), testing and modifying the Lexicalist Hypothesis of Chomsky (1970a) so as to assess the similarities of the major nodes. We then examine the deep structure of the traditional "adverbial clause". Using the interpretive transformationalist technique of, e.g., Hasegawa (1972), we derive certain such clauses from relative structure; and in seeking semantic motivation, we reanalyse derivations proposed for English "adverbial clauses" by Ross (1967a), Huddleston (1968) and Geis (1970), arguing for the existence of 'false ambiguities' of the kind criticised by Stockwell et al.(1973). Finally, we evaluate rival transformational and pure semantic accounts of some elliptical peripheral structures in Hebrew, tentatively formulating a rule of semantic interpretation for 'before' and 'after' expressions and relating this to interpretive rules for Comparative and Coordinative structures