Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts
Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts

Author: Andrzej Zuczkowski

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-11-15

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 9027269211

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This volume is a collection of 18 papers on the communication of certainty and uncertainty. The first part introduces recent theoretical developments and general models on the topic and its relations with modality, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, epistemicity, evidentiality, hedging, mitigation and speech acts. In the second part, results from empirical studies in medical and supportive contexts are presented, all of which are based on a conversational analysis approach. These papers report on professional dialogues including advice giving in gynecological consultations, breaking diagnostic bad news to patients, emergency calls, addiction therapeutic community meetings and bureaucratic-institutional interactions. The final part concerns the qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora, addressing scientific writing (both research and popular articles) and academic communication in English, German, Spanish and Romanian. The collection is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective and to health professionals interested in the practical implications of communicating certainty or uncertainty.

Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between
Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between

Author: Sibilla Cantarini

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-11-15

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 9027269149

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The selected papers of this volume cover five main topics, namely ‘Certainty: The conceptual differential’; ‘(Un)Certainty as attitudinality’; ‘Dialogical exchange and speech acts’; ‘Onomasiology’; and ‘Applications in exegesis and religious discourse’. By examining the general theme of the communication of certainty and uncertainty from different scientific fields, theoretical approaches and perspectives, this compendium of state-of-the-art research papers provides both an interdisciplinary comparison of the latest investigations, methods and findings, and new advances and theoretical insights with a common focus on human communication.

Questions and Epistemic Stance in Contemporary Spoken British English
Questions and Epistemic Stance in Contemporary Spoken British English

Author: Andrzej Zuczkowski

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1527567346

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This volume explores a model of epistemic stance, according to which speakers can communicate each single piece of information either as known/certain or uncertain or unknown. It presents a qualitative analysis of extracts from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 to support the idea that questions come from two distinct epistemic positions: the Unknowing and the Uncertain; this latter ranges along two poles: Not Knowing Whether and Believing. In the epistemic continuum, Unknowing questions express a lack of knowledge and range from open to closed and dual wh-questions. On the other hand, Uncertain questions express a lack of certainty and range from maximum uncertainty (Not Knowing Whether-questions advancing a doubt) to minimum uncertainty (Believing-questions advancing a supposition). Both Unknowing and Uncertain questions can be directed either at the answerer’s Knowing or Believing position, depending on their aim. The volume will appeal to scholars concerned with the topic of question design and epistemic stance from a theoretical and analytical perspective, as well as those interested in applying these findings in their teaching practice.

Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology
Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology

Author: Lorenzo Magnani

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 3319389831

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This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. It includes revised contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR’015), held on June 25-27 in Sestri Levante, Italy. The book is divided into three main parts, the first of which focuses on models, reasoning and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, addressing issues concerning information visualization, experimental methods and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving and reasoning. The respective contributions analyze different types of reasoning, discussing various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of historical, epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies in experimental research, this part aims at fostering new discussions and stimulating new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the field of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of current theories and applications of model-based reasoning.

Communicating Science Effectively
Communicating Science Effectively

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2017-03-08

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0309451051

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Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.

Elasticity in Healthcare Communication
Elasticity in Healthcare Communication

Author: Grace Qiao Zhang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-08-18

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1108905137

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Elastic language is a phenomenon in linguistics that refers to how we stretch the meanings of words, depending on the context in which they are used – for example many, about 20, perhaps, could be. This study looks specifically at elastic language in the fields of medicine and healthcare, showing how it is used to serve both the patient's and the professional's needs. It explores the pragmatics and metapragmatics of elasticity in the delivery of online medical information as a way of avoiding miscommunication. Based on data from Chinese and English sources, it takes a cross-cultural perspective, to present an account of harmony and disharmony between professional medical websites and their users. Adding exciting new dimensions to the fields of health communication and pragmatics, it is essential reading for scholars and advanced students in semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and interactional linguistics, as well as professionals involved in healthcare and communication.

A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare
A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare

Author: Sarah Bigi

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 9027249377

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This volume addresses the issue of pragmatic meaning and interpretation in communication contexts regarding health and does so by combining a series of diverse and complementary approaches, which together highlight the relevance of successfully shared understanding to achieve more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable healthcare systems. The volume is divided into five thematic sections: 1) Analytical approaches to health communication, 2) Intercultural and mediated communication, 3) Negotiation and meaning construction, 4) Expertise and common ground, 5) Uncertainty and evasive answers, bringing together a group of top scholars on the much-debated issue of shared understanding both at the micro-level of dialogues between professionals and patients, and the macro-level of institutional communication. In the variety of its contributions, it represents an ambitious attempt at setting pragmatics at the core of healthcare communication research and practice, by combining conceptual reflections on core topics in the field of pragmatics (among which are speech acts, common ground, ambiguity, implicitness), with discourse and linguistic analysis of real-world examples exploring various problems in health communication.

From Pragmatics to Dialogue
From Pragmatics to Dialogue

Author: Edda Weigand

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2018-09-15

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9027263744

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This volume aims at building bridges from pragmatics to dialogue and overcoming the gap between two ‘circles’ which have cut themselves off from each other in recent decades even if both addressed the same object, ‘language use’. Pragmatics means the study of natural language use. There is however no clear answer as to what language use means. We are instead confronted with multiple and diverse models in an uncircumscribed field of language use. When trying to transform such a puzzle of pieces into a meaningful picture we are confronted with the complexity of language use which does not mean ‘language’ put to ‘use’ but represents the unity of a complex whole and calls for a total change in methodology towards a holistic theory. Human beings as dialogic individuals use language as dialogue which allows them to tackle the vicissitudes of their lives. Dialogue and its methodology of action and reaction can be traced back to human nature and provides the key to the unstructured field of pragmatics. The contributions to this volume share this common ground and address various perspectives in different types of action game.

Academic Writing and Reader Engagement
Academic Writing and Reader Engagement

Author: Niall Curry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-28

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1000394514

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Academic Writing and Reader Engagement offers a concise linguistic description of the use and functions of questions in English, French and Spanish and discusses their value to the teaching of academic writing. This book: Enables a better understanding of how writers engage readers in academic writing in English, French, and Spanish and where each language behaves similarly or differently; Explains how authors express opinions, organise discourse and create relationships with readers via questions in their academic writing and the various functions questions perform; Brings together research on corpus and contrastive linguistics, highlighting how these two fields can support one another; Offers a thorough investigation of reader engagement markers from a range of linguistic perspectives and considers how knowledge of these markers could be applied to the teaching and learning of academic writing in each language; Employs corpus data totalling approximately 1.2 million words from all three languages to illustrate the varying roles and representations of questions in each language. Providing an invaluable resource for scholars learning to communicate successfully within their academic community, as well as teachers of English, French and/or Spanish for academic purposes, this book is key reading for students and researchers of academic discourse, contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Emergency Communication
Emergency Communication

Author: Giolo Fele

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-04-06

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 3031262395

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This book explores communication in emergency call and response centers, taking an approach drawn from Conversation Analysis to examine how call-takers answer calls and the ways in which dispatch is issued in different contexts. It offers an original contribution to the study of the organization of emergency calls, the ways such calls are treated, and some of the practical problems that emerge when dealing with them. The author offers a systematic review of studies in the international field of the organization of emergency calls, while at the same time providing fresh case studies, illustrated with empirical materials, taken from audio- and video- recordings of the everyday activities of call and response centers. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social interaction and may be appreciated by all scholars and practitioners working on the social management of emergency situations, including in fields such as Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics.