The focus of this volume is on medical discourse, a domain of language which deserves closer scrutiny by academics as well as practitioners, due to its increasing relevance and pervasiveness in modern society. Despite the wealth of publications dealing with specialized or academic discourse and its rhetoric, few of these are devoted specifically to medical discourse. This book seeks to redress the balance by bringing together a number of studies that bear witness to the widespread interest in medical texts shown by linguists and professional communities around the world. The volume is divided into two main parts: the first targets medical discourse in its spoken dimension, while the second contains various analyses of written texts. The theoretical perspectives and individual case studies presented here reflect the wide range of methodological approaches and theoretical issues that characterise current research in the field.

Autorentext

The Editors: Maurizio Gotti is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bergamo, Italy. He is currently President of the Italian Association of University Language Centres and Director of CERLIS, a centre for research on specialized languages based at the University of Bergamo. His main areas of interest are the features and origins of English specialized discourse, English syntax, lexicology and lexicography. Françoise Salager-Meyer teaches English for Specific Purposes and Russian at the University of the Andes (Mérida, Venezuela), where she co-ordinates the Multidisciplinary and Multilingual Research Group on Scientific Discourse Analysis. She has published several articles dealing with the linguistic, rhetorical and discoursal features of medical English, Spanish and French prose in international journals and has edited the Language and Medicine section of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2005).

Inhalt

Contents: Maurizio Gotti/Françoise Salager-Meyer: Introduction - Ellen Barton: Trajectories of Alignment and the Situated Ethics of End-of-Life Discussions in American Medicine - Hugo Bowles: Conversation Analysis and Health Communication: Updating a Developing Relationship - Sally Candlin: Constructing Knowledge, Understanding and Meaning Between Patients and Nurses - Maria Grazia Guido: The Discourse of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Specialized-Genre Conventions vs. West African Refugees' Narrative Representations - Rick Iedema: (Post-)bureaucratizing Medicine: Health Reform and the Reconfiguration of Contemporary Clinical Work - Florian Menz/Johanna Lalouschek: 'I just can't tell you how much it hurts.' Gender-relevant Differences in the Description of Chest Pain - Branca Telles Ribeiro/Diana De Souza Pinto: The Psychiatric Interview: An Insider's Perspective - Celia Roberts: Continuities and Discontinuities in Doctor-Patient Consultations in a Multilingual Society - Srikant Sarangi/Lucy Brookes-Howell: Recontextualising the Familial Lifeworld in Genetic Counselling Case Notes - Didier Carnet/Anne Magnet: Editorials: An Intrinsic and/or Extrinsic Genre in Medical Journals - Kjersti Fløttum: Medical Research Articles in the Comparative Perspectives of Discipline and Language - David R. Hall: Medical Leaflets, Empowerment and Disempowerment - Isabel K. León/Lourdes Divasson: Nominal Domain in the Biomedical Research Paper: A Grammatico-rhetorical Study of Postmodification - Susan McKay: The Discursive Construction of Health Risk in Magazines: Messages, Registers and Readers - Philippa Mungra: Macrostructure and Rhetorical Moves in Secondary Research Articles: The Meta-Analysis and the Systematic Analysis - Päivi Pahta: This is Very Important : A Corpus Study of Amplifiers in Medical Writing - Jordi Piqué-Angordans/Santiago Posteguillo: Peer Positive and Negative Assessment in Medical English Written Genres - Françoise Salager-Meyer/Maria Angeles Alcaraz Ariza/Maryelis Pabón/Nahirana Zambrano: Paying One's Intellectual Debt: Acknowledgments in Scientific/Conventional and Complementary/Alternative Medical Research - Irma Taavitsainen: Audience Guidance and Learned Medical Writing in Late Medieval English - Laura Wright: On the Global Dissemination of Medical Writing: Medicines Required by a Sea-surgeon in 1715.