Web counseling: A new health discourse

Abstract

The current research seeks to analyse a corpus formed by question entries on health issues that appeared in biomedical/health sites and forums. The focus of the paper is to identify the dimension of reality portrayed in health web-discourse. The samples collected were analysed individually and then organised in tables in order to find discourse patterns for structure and organization of moves together with their functional meaning. For each move, grammatical items were identified in order to assess the dimension of evidentiality, modality, and affect. The writer's attitude toward the stance is analyzed through epistemic modality; the reliability and the qualification of source-of-information through direct evidence (perceptual markers and beliefs) and indirect evidence (inference and reasoning), emotive load through the lexical analyses of emotions expressed in first person. The findings are intended to provide new insights into web-based discourse on medical exchanges in doctor-patient communication.