This paper is concerned with research on healthcare communication that draws on Halliday's system... more This paper is concerned with research on healthcare communication that draws on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Section 1 intro duces Halliday's notion of appliable linguistics, with SFL as a particular manifes tation. Section 2 deals with instances of healthcare communication in the form of medical consultations, and shows how they can be illuminated through SF text analysis. Section 3 relates medical consultations to institutions of healthcare along two dimensions, stratification and instantiation; and it suggests that insti tutions can be analyzed as aggregates of situation types. Section 4 considers the field of activity within healthcare contexts, suggesting how texts in situation types characterized by different fields complement one another. Section 5 adds tenor considerations in the form of the institutional healthcare roles across fields. Section 6 explores patient journeys through hospitals as sequences of situation types. Section 7 asks how risks and failures inherent in patient journeys can be interpreted, and then analyzed and addressed, in terms of the orders of systems in a hospital. Section 8 continues this systemic analysis, applying them to patients, and Section 9 extends the analysis to healthcare systems, as semotechnical sys tems. Section 10 shows how relationshipcentered healthcare can be interpreted in terms of SFL.
, does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or ... more , does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university, and that to the best of my knowledge and belief it does not contain any material previously published or written by another person where due reference is not made in the text. This is also to certify that this thesis meets the
Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 2013
Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the de-velopment and maintenanc... more Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the de-velopment and maintenance of positive relational bonds are central to the therapeutic process, the ways that therapists and clients become affiliated through discourse and interaction has not received very much attention. Taking up this concern from a conversation analytic perspective, this paper explores how therapists and clients negotiate affiliation around clients’ affective and evaluative talk or attitudinal stance. In order to illustrate the application of our method, we have chosen to analyze audio- and video-recordings of two clinically relevant interactional contexts in which client stance constructions frequently occur: (1) client narratives; (2) client disagreements with therapists. We show that therapist responses to client attitudinal stances play an important role not only in securing affiliation and positive relational bonds with clients, but also in moving the interaction in a therapeutically re...
New discourse on language: Functional perspectives …, 2010
... that a theory of communal identi-- cation in text through afliation allows us to account for ... more ... that a theory of communal identi-- cation in text through afliation allows us to account for the wealth of information on identity that may be sought within an SFL framework (see also Tann this volume for a perspective on the discursive construal of collective identity in history texts). ...
This chapter introduces the need to establish Appliable Linguistics as the framework through whic... more This chapter introduces the need to establish Appliable Linguistics as the framework through which we study language-related issues—in theoretical linguistics, Applied Linguistics and other language-related disciplines. Appliable linguistics is an approach to language that takes everyday real-life languagerelated problems—both theoretical and practical—in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as a starting point and then develops and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in ...
, does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or ... more , does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university, and that to the best of my knowledge and belief it does not contain any material previously published or written by another person where due reference is not made in the text. This is also to certify that this thesis meets the
Within emotion-focused therapy (EFT), the client’s ability to express and reflect on core emotion... more Within emotion-focused therapy (EFT), the client’s ability to express and reflect on core emotional experiences is seen as fundamental to constructing the self and to entering into a change process. For this study, we 1) examine storytelling contexts in which clients do not disclose the emotional impact of their narrative, and 2) identify the interactional practices through which EFT therapists subsequently call attention to what the client may have felt. In doing so, we examine client stories drawn from video-taped individual psychotherapy sessions involving clinically depressed clients. Client stories and therapists’ responses to these stories were analysed using conversation analytic methods. Three different therapist response types were identified: eliciting, naming and illustrating the emotional impact of the client’s prior narrative. These responses also were found to differ in terms of how effectively they could display empathy and secure affiliation with clients. The implica...
Page 1. 16 CHAPTER 2 Theoretical Background and Approach This chapter offers an overview of the r... more Page 1. 16 CHAPTER 2 Theoretical Background and Approach This chapter offers an overview of the research on the subject of conversational humour and laughter that is most relevant to the current study, leading to a rationale for a ...
This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Ap... more This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Appliable Linguistics takes everyday real-life language-related problems – both theoretical and practical – in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as its starting point. It then uses and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in the context. The concept of appliable linguistics used in this volume is informed by the work of M.A.K. Halliday, who believes that "the value of a theory lies in the use that can be made of it." The chapters in this volume thus use and contribute to an appliable linguistics that engages with a range of issues including: translation, education, language teaching/learning, multimodality, media, social policy and action, and positive discourse analysis. This collection of research is offered as an initial step in the pursuit of Appliable Linguistics, which we hope will serve as a foundation for future work across the discipline.
While it has been established that humour seems to involve an incongruity of some kind, conversat... more While it has been established that humour seems to involve an incongruity of some kind, conversational humour can be seen to involve complementarities as well. In the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), it is the interaction of the complementary ideational and interpersonal metafunctions that exposes humorous meaning in conversation between aligned participants. This paper will present an analysis of conversational humour incorporating the SFL framework, in an attempt to exhibit the bonding between these two domains of meaning, and their couplings in language (Martin 2000a: 164). Examining internet communication in the form of online instant messages, evaluative meanings are analysed using Appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005), and discourse analysis (Martin & Rose 2007) is applied to demonstrate that humour is negotiated by a dual articulation of coupled metafunctional meanings. Participants are shown to create and acknowledge incongruities or 'wrinkles' ...
ABSTRACT We explore how client-centred empathy is practiced within a specific interac- tion type:... more ABSTRACT We explore how client-centred empathy is practiced within a specific interac- tion type: troubles telling sequences. Building on the work of Carl Rogers, who viewed empathy as a form of understanding that privileges the client’s point of view, empathy is examined as an interactional achievement in which clients create empathic opportunities by displaying their affectual stance, followed by therapists taking up these opportunities through affiliative displays. We found that empathic practices could be realized through a variety of verbal (naming other’s feelings, formulations, co-completions) and non-verbal resources (nod- ding, smiling). Further, we found that continuers played an important role in helping clients to develop their troubles stance in more detail, which, in turn, invited more explicit empathic displays from therapists.
We examine therapist nods in terms of how they display and maintain affiliation with clients in c... more We examine therapist nods in terms of how they display and maintain affiliation with clients in contexts in which therapists reformulate clients’ prior talk. We found that therapist nods functioned to maintain affiliation with clients irrespective of whether clients aligned (e.g., confirmed) or disaligned (e.g., disconfirmed) with the therapist’s prior reformulation. Further, we found that the sequential placement of a therapist’s nod was influenced by the quality of alignment; that is, in aligning contexts, nods were found to be contiguous to the client’s confirmation. In disaligning contexts, by contrast, therapists delayed the production of nods to a point at which the client either ‘fully’ disconfirmed or displayed an affectual stance regarding a personal event. We argue that these forms of delay index a practice in which therapists may successfully secure realignment with clients.
This paper explores conversational humor between friends and demonstrates through a systemic func... more This paper explores conversational humor between friends and demonstrates through a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective how friends play with evaluative meanings in their humor to achieve bonding and affiliation. Sequences of talk that feature shared laughter are analyzed and it is shown that speakers make humorous contrasts between social values related to their friendship groups and community memberships. Using SFL tools like appraisal, the examples reveal contrasts as well as layering of evaluations of experiences, people, and things in the speakers' lives with underlying community values known to be shared with those with whom they are joking. It is argued that this “convivial conversational humor” is one kind of
This article examines how Emotion-focused therapists use person-centred relational practices to r... more This article examines how Emotion-focused therapists use person-centred relational practices to re-affiliate with clients after clients have disagreed with therapists' formulations of clients' personal experience. Using the methods of conversation analysis, 70 client disagreements were identified from 15 video-taped sessions of Emotion-focused psychotherapy. Our main finding is that, in contexts of disagreement, talk is organized in Emotion-focused therapy to (1) maintain affiliation by neutralizing the potential conflict; and (2) preserve the client's epistemic primacy of experience by privileging the client's viewpoint. Person-centred relational practices were realized in two different ways: Most commonly, therapists would retreat from own position by affiliating with the client's contrasting position through a range of non-verbal (nods) and verbal resources (mirroring repeats, joint completions, second formulations); less common was for therapists to confront the disagreement, primarily as a problem in understanding that requires repair. Whereas the practice of retreating would lead to mutual affiliation and consensus between the participants, confronting the disagreement did not always lead to successful re-affiliation. This is because the therapist's repair initiation would sometimes contest the client's viewpoint, thus fostering further disaffiliation and placing the client's epistemic primacy at risk.
This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Ap... more This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Appliable Linguistics takes everyday real-life language-related problems-both theoretical and practical-in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as its starting point. It then uses and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in the context. The concept of appliable linguistics used in this volume is informed by the work of MAK Halliday, who believes that" the value of a theory lies in the use that ...
Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the development and maintenance... more Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the development and maintenance of positive relational bonds are central to the therapeutic process, the ways that therapists and clients become affiliated through discourse and in- teraction has not received very much attention. Taking up this concern from a conversation analytic perspective, this paper explores how therapists and clients negotiate affiliation around clients’ affective and evaluative talk or attitudinal stance. In order to illus- trate the application of our method, we have chosen to analyze audio- and video- recordings of two clinically relevant interactional contexts in which client stance constructions frequently occur: (1) client narratives; (2) client disagreements with therapists. We show that therapist responses to client attitudinal stances play an important role not only in securing affiliation and positive relational bonds with clients, but also in moving the interaction in a therapeuticall...
This paper is concerned with research on healthcare communication that draws on Halliday's system... more This paper is concerned with research on healthcare communication that draws on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Section 1 intro duces Halliday's notion of appliable linguistics, with SFL as a particular manifes tation. Section 2 deals with instances of healthcare communication in the form of medical consultations, and shows how they can be illuminated through SF text analysis. Section 3 relates medical consultations to institutions of healthcare along two dimensions, stratification and instantiation; and it suggests that insti tutions can be analyzed as aggregates of situation types. Section 4 considers the field of activity within healthcare contexts, suggesting how texts in situation types characterized by different fields complement one another. Section 5 adds tenor considerations in the form of the institutional healthcare roles across fields. Section 6 explores patient journeys through hospitals as sequences of situation types. Section 7 asks how risks and failures inherent in patient journeys can be interpreted, and then analyzed and addressed, in terms of the orders of systems in a hospital. Section 8 continues this systemic analysis, applying them to patients, and Section 9 extends the analysis to healthcare systems, as semotechnical sys tems. Section 10 shows how relationshipcentered healthcare can be interpreted in terms of SFL.
, does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or ... more , does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university, and that to the best of my knowledge and belief it does not contain any material previously published or written by another person where due reference is not made in the text. This is also to certify that this thesis meets the
Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 2013
Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the de-velopment and maintenanc... more Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the de-velopment and maintenance of positive relational bonds are central to the therapeutic process, the ways that therapists and clients become affiliated through discourse and interaction has not received very much attention. Taking up this concern from a conversation analytic perspective, this paper explores how therapists and clients negotiate affiliation around clients’ affective and evaluative talk or attitudinal stance. In order to illustrate the application of our method, we have chosen to analyze audio- and video-recordings of two clinically relevant interactional contexts in which client stance constructions frequently occur: (1) client narratives; (2) client disagreements with therapists. We show that therapist responses to client attitudinal stances play an important role not only in securing affiliation and positive relational bonds with clients, but also in moving the interaction in a therapeutically re...
New discourse on language: Functional perspectives …, 2010
... that a theory of communal identi-- cation in text through afliation allows us to account for ... more ... that a theory of communal identi-- cation in text through afliation allows us to account for the wealth of information on identity that may be sought within an SFL framework (see also Tann this volume for a perspective on the discursive construal of collective identity in history texts). ...
This chapter introduces the need to establish Appliable Linguistics as the framework through whic... more This chapter introduces the need to establish Appliable Linguistics as the framework through which we study language-related issues—in theoretical linguistics, Applied Linguistics and other language-related disciplines. Appliable linguistics is an approach to language that takes everyday real-life languagerelated problems—both theoretical and practical—in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as a starting point and then develops and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in ...
, does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or ... more , does not incorporate without acknowledgement any material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university, and that to the best of my knowledge and belief it does not contain any material previously published or written by another person where due reference is not made in the text. This is also to certify that this thesis meets the
Within emotion-focused therapy (EFT), the client’s ability to express and reflect on core emotion... more Within emotion-focused therapy (EFT), the client’s ability to express and reflect on core emotional experiences is seen as fundamental to constructing the self and to entering into a change process. For this study, we 1) examine storytelling contexts in which clients do not disclose the emotional impact of their narrative, and 2) identify the interactional practices through which EFT therapists subsequently call attention to what the client may have felt. In doing so, we examine client stories drawn from video-taped individual psychotherapy sessions involving clinically depressed clients. Client stories and therapists’ responses to these stories were analysed using conversation analytic methods. Three different therapist response types were identified: eliciting, naming and illustrating the emotional impact of the client’s prior narrative. These responses also were found to differ in terms of how effectively they could display empathy and secure affiliation with clients. The implica...
Page 1. 16 CHAPTER 2 Theoretical Background and Approach This chapter offers an overview of the r... more Page 1. 16 CHAPTER 2 Theoretical Background and Approach This chapter offers an overview of the research on the subject of conversational humour and laughter that is most relevant to the current study, leading to a rationale for a ...
This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Ap... more This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Appliable Linguistics takes everyday real-life language-related problems – both theoretical and practical – in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as its starting point. It then uses and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in the context. The concept of appliable linguistics used in this volume is informed by the work of M.A.K. Halliday, who believes that "the value of a theory lies in the use that can be made of it." The chapters in this volume thus use and contribute to an appliable linguistics that engages with a range of issues including: translation, education, language teaching/learning, multimodality, media, social policy and action, and positive discourse analysis. This collection of research is offered as an initial step in the pursuit of Appliable Linguistics, which we hope will serve as a foundation for future work across the discipline.
While it has been established that humour seems to involve an incongruity of some kind, conversat... more While it has been established that humour seems to involve an incongruity of some kind, conversational humour can be seen to involve complementarities as well. In the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), it is the interaction of the complementary ideational and interpersonal metafunctions that exposes humorous meaning in conversation between aligned participants. This paper will present an analysis of conversational humour incorporating the SFL framework, in an attempt to exhibit the bonding between these two domains of meaning, and their couplings in language (Martin 2000a: 164). Examining internet communication in the form of online instant messages, evaluative meanings are analysed using Appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005), and discourse analysis (Martin & Rose 2007) is applied to demonstrate that humour is negotiated by a dual articulation of coupled metafunctional meanings. Participants are shown to create and acknowledge incongruities or 'wrinkles' ...
ABSTRACT We explore how client-centred empathy is practiced within a specific interac- tion type:... more ABSTRACT We explore how client-centred empathy is practiced within a specific interac- tion type: troubles telling sequences. Building on the work of Carl Rogers, who viewed empathy as a form of understanding that privileges the client’s point of view, empathy is examined as an interactional achievement in which clients create empathic opportunities by displaying their affectual stance, followed by therapists taking up these opportunities through affiliative displays. We found that empathic practices could be realized through a variety of verbal (naming other’s feelings, formulations, co-completions) and non-verbal resources (nod- ding, smiling). Further, we found that continuers played an important role in helping clients to develop their troubles stance in more detail, which, in turn, invited more explicit empathic displays from therapists.
We examine therapist nods in terms of how they display and maintain affiliation with clients in c... more We examine therapist nods in terms of how they display and maintain affiliation with clients in contexts in which therapists reformulate clients’ prior talk. We found that therapist nods functioned to maintain affiliation with clients irrespective of whether clients aligned (e.g., confirmed) or disaligned (e.g., disconfirmed) with the therapist’s prior reformulation. Further, we found that the sequential placement of a therapist’s nod was influenced by the quality of alignment; that is, in aligning contexts, nods were found to be contiguous to the client’s confirmation. In disaligning contexts, by contrast, therapists delayed the production of nods to a point at which the client either ‘fully’ disconfirmed or displayed an affectual stance regarding a personal event. We argue that these forms of delay index a practice in which therapists may successfully secure realignment with clients.
This paper explores conversational humor between friends and demonstrates through a systemic func... more This paper explores conversational humor between friends and demonstrates through a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective how friends play with evaluative meanings in their humor to achieve bonding and affiliation. Sequences of talk that feature shared laughter are analyzed and it is shown that speakers make humorous contrasts between social values related to their friendship groups and community memberships. Using SFL tools like appraisal, the examples reveal contrasts as well as layering of evaluations of experiences, people, and things in the speakers' lives with underlying community values known to be shared with those with whom they are joking. It is argued that this “convivial conversational humor” is one kind of
This article examines how Emotion-focused therapists use person-centred relational practices to r... more This article examines how Emotion-focused therapists use person-centred relational practices to re-affiliate with clients after clients have disagreed with therapists' formulations of clients' personal experience. Using the methods of conversation analysis, 70 client disagreements were identified from 15 video-taped sessions of Emotion-focused psychotherapy. Our main finding is that, in contexts of disagreement, talk is organized in Emotion-focused therapy to (1) maintain affiliation by neutralizing the potential conflict; and (2) preserve the client's epistemic primacy of experience by privileging the client's viewpoint. Person-centred relational practices were realized in two different ways: Most commonly, therapists would retreat from own position by affiliating with the client's contrasting position through a range of non-verbal (nods) and verbal resources (mirroring repeats, joint completions, second formulations); less common was for therapists to confront the disagreement, primarily as a problem in understanding that requires repair. Whereas the practice of retreating would lead to mutual affiliation and consensus between the participants, confronting the disagreement did not always lead to successful re-affiliation. This is because the therapist's repair initiation would sometimes contest the client's viewpoint, thus fostering further disaffiliation and placing the client's epistemic primacy at risk.
This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Ap... more This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Appliable Linguistics takes everyday real-life language-related problems-both theoretical and practical-in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as its starting point. It then uses and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in the context. The concept of appliable linguistics used in this volume is informed by the work of MAK Halliday, who believes that" the value of a theory lies in the use that ...
Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the development and maintenance... more Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the development and maintenance of positive relational bonds are central to the therapeutic process, the ways that therapists and clients become affiliated through discourse and in- teraction has not received very much attention. Taking up this concern from a conversation analytic perspective, this paper explores how therapists and clients negotiate affiliation around clients’ affective and evaluative talk or attitudinal stance. In order to illus- trate the application of our method, we have chosen to analyze audio- and video- recordings of two clinically relevant interactional contexts in which client stance constructions frequently occur: (1) client narratives; (2) client disagreements with therapists. We show that therapist responses to client attitudinal stances play an important role not only in securing affiliation and positive relational bonds with clients, but also in moving the interaction in a therapeuticall...
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