Volume 26, Issue 1

In the discourse of political interviews, references to coparticipants can be expressed explicitly by proper nouns and forms of address, and they can be expressed implicitly by personal pronouns and other indexical expressions. The meaning of personal pronouns is context dependent and retrievable only by inference, and therefore is less determinate. Furthermore, it can shift as the status of the participants shifts in interaction. This may occur both in terms of social roles and in terms of roles in talk and footing. In this context, an analysis was conducted of televised political interviews broadcast during the 1997 and 2001 British general elections and just before the war with Iraq in 2003. Question–response sequences were identified in which politicians made use of pronominal shifts as a form of equivocation. These sequences were analyzed in the context of Bavelas et al.'s (1990) theory of equivocation and Goman's (1981) concept of footing. In all but one of the questions, the interviewers sought to establish the politicians' authorship, whereas the politician typically responds in terms of the principal; in the other instance, the questioner sought to establish the position of the principal and the politician responds in terms of his own authorship. Possible strategic advantages of these forms of equivocation are discussed.

Patient drug and treatment information leaflets are an important adjunct to primary health care for medical practitioners to use with patients. To assess comprehensibility of these documents, readability formulas are still used by medical researchers but are arguably of limited value. Checklists to guide the development of printed information, even when based on a systematic review of the literature, have not provided the desired guidance. An approach based on a systemic functional linguistics framework is offered here as one that can provide insight and directions for the improvement of these materials. A set of 18 rheumatology drug leaflets was analyzed at the levels of genre, discourse semantics, and some aspects of the lexicogrammar, so as to identify their characteristics and possible shortcomings as comprehensible documents for patients. While the drug information leaflet was identifiable as a genre with potentially up to nine structural moves, there was a high degree of variability in inclusion of moves, rhetorical functions within moves, and use of headings. The quality of patient information material can be improved by using an analysis that takes account of suitability of generic structure and rhetorical functions, specialization of lexis, status relations, macro-Theme, lexical density, and modalization. A usability strategy should be employed to support the directions provided by the analysis.

This paper is a contribution to research on the expression of expert advice-giving (e.g., Heritage and Sefi 1992; Silverman et al. 1992). We present a linguistic analysis of the ways in which the identity of the fictional expert advisor Lucy emerges in an Internet advice column run by professional health educators as part of a university health service. In discourse-analytical close readings of 280 question–answer records, we identify and discuss seven recurring strategies (the advisor's name, self-reference and use of address terms; expert information-giving; giving options and making readers think; the choice of vocabulary; offering opinions; the use of empathy; the display of humor), which together contribute to Lucy 's voice as an expert advice-giver if the readers repeatedly access the question–answer exchanges. This emerging identity is in line with the site's mission to provide information designed to facilitate independent and responsible decision processes and corresponds to an ideal of nondirectiveness, as also identified in the literature on other advisory settings (He 1994; Sarangi and Clarke 2002; Vehviläinen 2003). The constructed identity of Lucy thus makes ‘Lucy Answers’ an attractive site to (re)turn to for advice and complements the other services provided by the health educators.

Kenneth Burke sought to understand the motives writers establish in the textual scenes they create with a ‘grammar of motives’, which positions an action in one of five motives: the act, the agent, the scene, the purpose, and the agency (means). As discourse analysts shift focus from texts to human action in and through texts, Burke's ‘grammar of motives’ returns as a useful tool for the study of the discursive construction of human action. People who experience reactions due to food allergies commonly attribute them to the ingestion of specific foods. The validity of this attribution is denied, however, on a Web site concerning health and medical information. A motive analysis of this quasi-medical text shows that it is located in a negative means–act ratio, which denies that food (means) can cause human behavior (act)—the scientific view of causation. A comparative motive analysis of the claim that allergies do affect one's behavior is constructed within a positive means–agent ratio. That is, food (means) can affect a person's ability to act (agent). This analysis reveals deeper vested interests of the drug company which sponsors the Web site and of the personal experience and community of the allergy sufferer.