Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen

Halliday's introduction to functional grammar

Preface PART I: THE CLAUSE Chapter 1: The architecture of language Chapter 2: Towards a functional grammar Chapter 3: Clause as message Chapter 4: Clause as exchange Chapter 5: Clause as representation PART II: ABOVE, BELOW AND BEYOND THE CLAUSE Chapter 6: Below the clause: groups and phases Chapter 7: Above the clause: the clause complex Chapter 8: Group and phrase complexes Chapter 9: Around the clause: cohesion and discourse Chapter 10: Beyond the clause: metaphorical modes of expression References Index

Emergency communication: the discursive challenges facing emergency clinicians and patients in hospital emergency departments

Effective communication and interpersonal skills have long been recognized as fundamental to the delivery of quality health care. However, there is mounting evidence that the pressures of communication in high stress work areas such as hospital emergency departments (EDs) present particular challenges to the delivery of quality care. A recent report on incident management in the Australian health care system (NSW Health, 2005a) cites the main cause of critical incidents (that is, adverse events such as an incorrect procedure leading to patient harm), as being poor and inadequate communication between clinicians and patients. This article presents research that describes and analyses spoken interactions between health care practitioners and patients in one ED of a large, public teaching hospital in Sydney, Australia. The research aimed to address the challenges and critical incidents caused by breakdowns in communication that occur between health practitioners and patients and by refining and extending knowledge of discourse structures, to identify ways in which health care practitioners can enhance their communicative practices thereby improving the quality of the patient journey through the ED. The research used a qualitative ethnographic approach combined with discourse analysis of audio-recorded interactions. Some key findings from the analysis of data are outlined including how the absence of information about processes, the pressure of time within the ED, divergent goals of clinicians and patients, the delivery of diagnoses and professional roles impact on patient experiences. Finally, the article presents an in-depth linguistic analysis on interpersonal and experiential patterns in the discursive practices of patients, nurses and doctors.

Grammar–The First Covert Operation of War

The cultural perturbations created by 11 September (9/11) have produced a layering of discourses. These layers offer a remarkable opportunity for interpreting ideology in relation to text construction. We examine two degrees of this textual dispersion: first, the motivated selection in the crafting of President Bush’s first speech after 9/11; and second, the speech by British Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins as he exhorts his troops before engagement in the war against Iraq of 2003. The texts are remarkable for their similarities and their differences – two different contexts in which humans are called to enact policy which involves behaviour that should be abhorrent. Bush presents an asymmetrical world (in moral, not economic, terms); and this asymmetry is mainly expressed in the consistent allocation of grammatical roles. Collins presents the regiment’s task as a family mission, with dramatic switching between positive constructions of an Old Testament Iraq and the regiment (‘family’) on the one hand, and the ‘rightful destruction’ of the enemy, on the other hand. Again, but in more varied ways, it is the grammar which carries the burden of discriminating between those to be protected and those to be targeted. Ideology in language follows from the fact that we can construct multiple versions of the ‘same’ physical, biological, social and semiotic events.

Systemic grammar in computation: the Nigel case

Abstract : Systemic grammar, the framework developed by M.A.K. Halliday and others, has been used successfully in the service of computational linguistic tasks, both in generation and in parsing. Currently a large computational systemic grammar of English, the Nigel grammar, is being developed for text generation. This report uses this grammar for an examination of what the design properties of systemic grammar are that make it attractive for text generation. In particular, the functional character of the grammar and its organization around the notion of choice are presented. The generation of one example is discussed. (Author)

Applying systemic functional linguistics in healthcare contexts

Abstract This paper is concerned with research on healthcare communication that draws on Hallidays systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Section 1 introduces Hallidays notion of appliable linguistics, with SFL as a particular manifestation. 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 institutions 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 semo-technical systems. Section 10 shows how relationship-centered healthcare can be interpreted in terms of SFL.

Functions of language in two frameworks

AbstractSome of the most central problems in linguistics concern how language fills its characteristic roles: how it is useful, the nature and extent of its translatability, and the nature of the integrity of texts. Within linguistics there are many kinds of description that bear on such questions, one kind being the description of language in terms of its functions. Comparing these functional descriptions, the various descriptions do not all cover the same ground. Rather, each is quite partial, and appropriate ways to combine them into a more comprehensive account are not evident. It is hard to know wherein they conflict, wherein they agree, and where they simply speak of different things.This paper is part of an effort to relate various accounts. It is the first in a pair of papers that compare two particular accounts: Rhetorical Structure Theory and Systemic Linguistics.Rhetorical Structure Theory, initially formulated in 1983, describes texts in terms of functionally-defined relations that hold betwee...

Multilingual natural language generation for multilingual software: A functional linguistic approach

In this paper we present an implemented account of multilingual linguistic resources for multilingual text generation that improves significantly on the degree of reuse of resources both across languages and across applications. We argue that this is a necessary step for multilingual generation in order to reduce the high cost of constructing linguistic resources and to make natural language generation relevant for a wider range of applications particularly, in this paper, for multilingual software and user interfaces. We begin by contrasting a weak and a strong approach to multilinguality in the state of the art in multilingual text generation. Neither approach has provided sufficient principles for organizing multilingual work. We then introduce our framework , where multilingual variation is included as an intrinsic feature of all levels of representation. We provide an example of multilingual tactical generation using this approach and discuss some of the performance, maintenance, and development issu...

Language in context: A new model for evaluating student writing☆

Abstract Evaluation of student writing in the school context has often been based on partial and incomplete linguistic models. We present a language-in-context model that integrates linguistic analysis of higher levels of organization in writing with analysis of student use of grammatical resources. Procedures for assessing student writing that are based on this model and used for diagnostic purposes are illustrated by comparing three Report texts produced by 7-year-olds.

Factors affecting communication in emergency departments: doctors and nurses’ perceptions of communication in a trilingual ED in Hong Kong

BackgroundThis study investigates clinicians’ views of clinician-patient and clinician-clinician communication, including key factors that prevent clinicians from achieving successful communication in a large, high-pressured trilingual Emergency Department (ED) in Hong Kong.MethodsResearchers interviewed 28 doctors and nurses in the ED. The research employed a qualitative ethnographic approach. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, translated into English and coded using the Nvivo software. The researchers examined issues in both clinician-patient and clinician-clinician communication. Through thematic analyses, they identified the factors that impede communication most significantly, as well as the relationship between these factors. This research highlights the significant communication issues and patterns in Hong Kong EDs.ResultsThe clinician interviews revealed that communication in EDs is complex, nuanced and fragile. The data revealed three types of communication issues: (1) the experiential parameter (i.e. processes and procedures), (2) the interpersonal parameter (i.e. clinicians’ engagements with patients and other clinicians) and (3) contextual factors (i.e. time pressures, etc.). Within each of these areas, the specific problems were the following: compromises in knowledge transfer at key points of transition (e.g. triage, handover), inconsistencies in medical record keeping, serious pressures on clinicians (e.g. poor clinician-patient ratio and long working hours for clinicians) and a lack of focus on interpersonal skills.ConclusionsThese communication problems (experiential, interpersonal and contextual) are intertwined, creating a complex yet weak communication structure that compromises patient safety, as well as patient and clinician satisfaction. The researchers argue that hospitals should develop and implement best-practice policies and educational programmes for clinicians that focus on the following: (1) understanding the primary causes of communication problems in EDs, (2) accepting the tenets and practices of patient-centred care, (3) establishing clear and consistent knowledge transfer procedures and (4) lowering the patient-to-clinician ratio in order to create the conditions that foster successful communication. The research provides a model for future research on the relationship between communication and the quality and safety of the patient safety.

Communication in Hong Kong Accident and Emergency Departments The Clinicians’ Perspectives

In this article, we report findings from the first qualitatively driven study of patient–clinician communication in Hong Kong Accident and Emergency Departments (AEDs). In light of the Hong Kong Hospital Authority’s policy emphasis on patient-centered care and communication in the public hospitals it oversees, we analyze clinicians’ perceptions of the role and relevance of patient-centered communication strategies in emergency care. Although aware of the importance of effective communication in emergency care, participants discussed how this was frequently jeopardized by chronic understaffing, patient loads, and time pressures. This was raised in relation to the absence of spoken interdisciplinary handovers, the tendency to downgrade interpersonal communication with patients, and the decline in staff attendance at communication training courses. Participants’ frequent descriptions of patient-centered communication as dispensable from, and time-burdensome in, AEDs highlight a discrepancy between the stated Hong Kong Hospital Authority policy of patient-centered care and the reality of contemporary Hong Kong emergency practice.