about this author

My principal research interests lie in the field of applied sociolinguistics, multi-modal discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Broadly, I am interested in interdisciplinary approaches to professional communication, with a special emphasis on health communication. My present research, for example, focuses on multi-modal approaches to medical discourse. One strand of this health communication research involves a corpus linguistic exploration of electronic health messages: an examination of the health concerns communicated by contributors to medical professionals online. The research emphasis is on how these concerns are communicated to health professionals and what, in turn, their linguistic encoding tells us about individuals' attitudes towards health and illness. For a brief overview of the findings, please see my broadcast 'The Word Counter' on You Tube. For a more detailed and extensive account of this research, please see my forthcoming (2013) book Adolescent Health Communication: A Corpus and Discourse Approach (Bloomsbury).Another strand of my research involves examining the phenomenon of medicalisation (the process whereby non-diseases are defined as diseases). Specifically, this area of my research uses critical multi-modal discourse to investigate the ways in which pharmaceutical companies and advertisers promote lifestyle drugs for benign conditions.