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The aim of this paper is to describe, analyse, and discuss the process of formulation in the specific context of mental health (MH). Formulation is a fundamental element of the work of psychiatrists and other MH clinicians that is expected to be mastered during training. The literature, however, shows that formulation is rarely explicitly addressed in the psychiatric curriculum; rather, it is implicitly developed through modelling, and/or clinical practice. This paper focuses on case formulation in one MH context in Australia. It tracks the iterative formulation of one patient in a hospital emergency department. The analysis uses resources from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) situated within a broader framework of discourse analysis. It highlights patterns of lexical relations and nominalisation as well as the range of conjunctions. These make explicit how the clinicians talk about the patient's illness and shape their developing understanding into a logical formulation. We see applications of this work for the training of mental health professionals. These data make explicit the ways in which the participating clinicians use language in the process of formulation. By bringing this process to the level of consciousness, it can be discussed and evaluated and become a pedagogic resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which clinicians enact 'being a team', by analysing how they inform one another about critical patient information. The process where this information exchange happens is known as 'clinical handover'. The study that informs this paper spanned ten months of data collection in four hospitals, involving 150 clinicians and five patients. The analysis presented here draws on data collected at one of the hospital sites: an emergency department at a regional tertiary teaching hospital. Our analysis reveals how central clinical handover is to 'being a team' in health care, and how deficiencies in handover weaken clinical teams' ability to provide continuous and safe care for their patients. We further discuss how clinical practitioners' own responses to the footage foregrounded different issues compared to those revealed by formal analysis; namely, issues centring on relationships, and on practical steps to ensure these relationships could be improved. We reflect on the differences between our own formal analysis of the footage, and practitioners' 'lived response' to the footage, and the implications of these differences for how we as analysts conceptualise 'teamness' in organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper juxtaposes the modelling of language and context in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) with a modelling of legal relations in jurisprudence (that of W. N. Hohfeld), in order to discuss realizations of tenor in legal discourse in the context of the High Court of Australia. In particular, the paper focuses on choices of modality in the judicial reasoning, that is judgments, of the different judges in a single case. The case of Al-Kateb was chosen because all seven High Court Judges gave judgments and because of the close result: four judges in the majority and three dissenting. While textual analysis suggests potential discursive features of the judgment register, it also suggests differences in the repertoire of individual judges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies qualitative discourse analysis to 'shift-change handovers', events in which nurses hand over care for their patients to their colleagues. To improve patient safety, satisfaction and inclusion, hospitals increasingly require nursing staff to hand over at the patient's bedside, rather than in staff-only areas. However, bedside handover is for many a new and challenging communicative practice. To evaluate how effectively nurses achieve bedside handover, we observed, audio-recorded and transcribed nursing shift-change handovers in a short stay medical ward at an Australian public hospital. Drawing on discourse analysis influenced by systemic functional linguistics we identify four handover styles: exclusive vs inclusive and objectifying vs agentive. The styles capture interactional/interpersonal meaning choices associated with whether and how nurses include patients during handover, and informational/ideational meaning choices associated with whether or not nurses select and organise clinical information in ways that recognise patients' agency. We argue that the co-occurrence of inclusive with agentive and exclusive with objectifying styles demonstrates that how nurses talk about their patients is powerfully influenced by whether and how they also talk to them. In noting the continued dominance of exclusive objectifying styles in handover interactions, we suggest that institutional change needs to be supported by communication training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a linguistic perspective on changes in news writing in the context of Australian wartime journalism over a century. It forms part of a larger study that takes reports of the conclusion of war from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) as a set of texts of the same register, through which to investigate change in the meanings and context of news reporting. Reports of the ends of seven wars (or the end of a phase of war) in which Australia has been involved from 1902 to 2003 were analysed linguistically using the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (see e.g. Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). In SFL, the configuration of conditions that motivate a writer's selection of meanings ? the context of situation ? is viewed as a set of parameters: field (the kind of social interaction that is taking place), tenor (the relationship of the participants in the interaction) and mode (what part the language is playing in the interaction) (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). This paper focuses on the parameter of tenor, particularly social distance and the 'textual visibility' of the journalist, by exploring some lexicogrammatical realizations of semantic motifs. These motifs are: the textual identification of the journalist or agencies (realized by bylines), mediation of news information (realized by projection and the thematic status of projected information), semantic intervention in the news process (realized by tense selections that bring all news information in line with the journalist's frame of temporal reference), and codal sharing (realized by homophoric and deictic reference). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are 220 community legal centres in Australia, many of which work on a selfhelp model that entails volunteer lawyers giving advice to clients who will then undertake their own legal work. This discourse analytic study explores the discursive interaction between volunteer lawyers and clients in a community legal centre in Brisbane. The analysis investigates the presence of authoritarian versus participatory strategies in order to look at the type of power relation present in their interaction. Two discursive features that characterise lawyer-client conversations were identified as being significant in this type of free advice session: register (formal-technical/informal) and interruptions. The results show that the lawyers tend to make less use of power-related strategies than has been seen in previous studies. Instead, they use a discourse of facilitation (participatory discourse) that is expressed in their register in the form of politeness strategies, use of colloquial language and expressions of support; and in their interruptions in the form of cooperative overlapping speech. It is discussed that the use of these discursive features fits with the nature of these particular interactions. That is, the legal advice offered in community legal centres could be viewed as more of an 'expert advice giving' rather than a traditional lawyer-client interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The motivations of those who give consent to bio-banking research have received a great deal of attention in recent years. Previous work draws upon the notion of altruism, though the self and/or family have been proposed as significant factors. Drawing on 11 interviews with staff responsible for seeking consent to cancer bio-banking and 13 observations of staff asking people to consent in routine clinical encounters, we investigate how potential participants are oriented to, and constructed as oriented to, self and other related concerns (Sarangi 2007). We adopt a rhetorical discourse analytic approach to the data and our perspective can be labelled as 'ethics-in-interaction'. Using analytic concepts such as repetition, extreme case formulation, typical case formulation and contrast structure, our observations are three-fold. Firstly, we demonstrate that orientation to 'general others' in altruistic accounts and to 'self' in minimising burden are foregrounded in constructions of motivation to participate in cancer bio-banking across the data corpus. Secondly, we identify complex relational accounts which involve the self as being more prominent in the consent encounter data where the staff have a nursing background, whereas 'general others' feature more when the staff have a scientific background. Finally, we suggest implications based on the disparities between how participants are oriented during interviews and consent encounters, which may have relevance for developing professional reflective practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]