1,720,979 research outputs found
Exploring epistemic management of healthcare interactions in the digital era (short communication)
No full text'The benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks... they say' Italian Facebook users' comments on the AstraZeneca vaccine suspension
No full textThis study aims to analyse Italian Internet users' comments on two posts that appeared on the Facebook page of the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera during a particularly critical phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (specifically, March 2021). At that time, the AstraZeneca vaccine had been temporarily suspended in some European countries due to confirmed reports of blood clots but subsequently declared “safe and effective” by the European Medicines Agency. Two datasets of comments were collected and analysed by combining automatic and manual, as well as quantitative and qualitative, methods. The main findings shed light on the orientation (agreement vs disagreement), construction of consensus and dissent, and epistemic positioning of Facebook users when they are confronted and engaged in dialogue with uncertain news about public health issues
Self-mention and uncertain communication in the British Medical Journal (1840–2007). The decrease of subjectivity uncertainty markers
Full text linkThe communication of a scientific finding as certain or uncertain largely determines whether that information will be translated into practice. In this study, a corpus of 80 articles published in the British Medical Journal for over 167 years (1840–2007) is analysed by focusing on three categories of uncertainty markers, which explicitly reveal a writer’s subjectivity: (1) I/we epistemic verbs; (2) I/we modal verbs; and (3) epistemic non-verbs conveying personal opinions. The quantitative analysis shows their progressive decrease over time, which can be due to several variables, including the evolution of medical knowledge and practice, changes in medical research and within the scientific community, and more stringent guidelines for the scientific writing (regarding types of articles, their structure and rhetorical style)
La comunicazione dell’incertezza in medicina: analisi diacronica di un corpus di articoli del British Medical Journal (1840-2007)
No full textHypothetical questions in everyday Italian conversations
No full textSimulation is an important cognitive resource involved in many mental processes. In this paper, we focus our attention on hypothetical questions (HQs) which are “communicative tools” used by speakers to encourage the activation of that resource, i.e., to invite their interlocutors to imagine a hypothetical scenario and to answer one or more related questions. While their functions have been broadly investigated in institutional settings, little has been written about such questions regarding everyday talk, and no work has been conducted specifically on the Italian language. This paper aims to fill this gap by analysing the linguistic designs, the epistemic stances conveyed, and the pragmatic functions accomplished by a set of HQs taken from a corpus of ordinary Italian conversations. The analysis reveals that the linguistic design of HQs is complex, in the sense that they can be made up of different types of hypothetical and interrogative components; the epistemic stances conveyed are numerous, in the sense that their hypothetical and interrogative components can come from different epistemic positions; and unlike HQs used in institutional settings, their pragmatic functions are multiple, ranging from finding out the interlocutor's opinion, communicating rhetorically the questioners’ point of view, asking for advice, asking for permission, making proposals
Exploring online patient-doctor interactions. An epistemic and pragmatic analysis of Q&A patterns in an Italian “Ask to the doctor” medical forum
No full textThe main objective of this research is to investigate the epistemic and pragmatic management of patient-doctor interactions in Italian online health communities. To achieve this goal, an advanced web scraping methodology was used to extract from an Italian Q&A service (within the healthcare platforms, Il Mio Dottore) 200 pairs of questions and answers concerning two pathological conditions: anxiety and hypothyroidism. We first tagged the two sub-corpora and analyzed them both quantitatively and qualitatively to establish (i) what types of questions were used by patients, and what epistemic attitude and pragmatic function they convey; (ii) whether doctors’ replies were aligned or not; (iii) whether there were differences between the two sub-corpora. The results revealed many similarities between the two sub-corpora, but also some differences, mainly concerning doctors’ response patterns, with a tendency towards misalignment more pronounced in the anxiety sub-corpus. The practical implications of this and similar research may be numerous. First, they can improve understanding of the epistemic and pragmatic dynamics at play in Q&A services. Secondly, such knowledge can be used to formulate practical recommendations to foster better alignment with patients, thereby improving their engagement. Finally, this knowledge can guide the development of chatbot design guidelines
The third transitional Identity of migrant adolescents. The case of Hotel House an Italian multi-ethnic skyscraper-ghetto
Full text linkThe adolescent’s identity achievement is a complex task, even more so if they are migrants living in a particular context of ethnic ghettoization. Hotel House is an enormous, isolated condominium situated on the outskirts of Porto Recanati, a small Italian town. It is a unique reality poorly studied from a social psychological perspective. The present paper aims to measure the perceived levels of self-concept clarity, self-determination, ethnic group identification, relationship with parents, depression and life satisfaction in a group of 91 adolescents (11–19 years; 30% females; 1.5 immigrant’s generation) living in this context. The analysis shows low levels of self-concept clarity and self-determination, especially in female adolescents, quite satisfactory relationships with their parents and medium levels of group identification and life satisfaction. The identification with their ethnic subgroups seems to provide a third transitional identity which works as a temporary link between native country values and host country values. The regression analysis shows significant associations: self-determination is negatively associated with depression and positively associated with the perception of life satisfaction; the father’s closeness is a negative predictor for depression and a positive predictor for life satisfaction; mother’s closeness is negatively associated with depression
Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Italian epistemic marker “mi sa” [to me it knows] compared to “so” [I know], “non so” [I don’t know], “non so se” [I don’t know whether], “credo” [I believe], “penso” [I think].
No full textIn this research 2 closely intertwined Studies – the first of which serves as a pilot for the second one – on the Italian epistemic marker mi sa [lit. to me it knows] are presented. This marker, which seems to have no equivalent in other European languages, has received little attention in the literature. Specifically, no investigations have been conducted: • on the occurrences of mi sa in contemporary spoken corpora; • on the epistemic relationship between mi sa and other modal expressions that use the verb sapere [to know] in the first person singular of the simple present (so [I know], non so [I do not know], non so se [I do not know whether]); • on the supposed epistemic synonymy of mi sa with credo [I believe] and penso [I think]. Study 1 filled the first gap by analyzing the occurrences of mi sa detected in the Italian spoken corpus KIParla (a contemporary and upgradable corpus collecting more than 100 hours of conversations, freely accessible at https://kiparla.it). Their analysis led to the identification of six types of structures, which can be reduced to two main ones, differing in meaning and morphology: • mi sa che + proposition, e.g., mi sa che mi si è fermato l’orologio [I think that my watch stopped] (97.9%, including the plain form mi sa che + proposition 60.6%, mi sa parenthetical 26.6%, mi sa + elliptical proposition 5.3%, mi sa che [pending] 4.3% and mi sa di no 1.1%) and • mi sa di [metaphorical], e.g., mi sa tanto di collegio [to me it looks a lot like a boarding school] (2.1%). Starting from the results of Study 1, Study 2 was developed to fill the second and third gap through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of a questionnaire specifically designed and administered online. It was completed by 201 participants, almost all were native Italian speakers (92.04%; 4.48% were bilingual; only 3.48% were not Italian mother-tongue). As for the epistemic relationships between the six epistemic markers and the supposed epistemic synonymy, the statistical analysis revealed that for the majority of the participants: • in the epistemic continuum that goes from unknowledge to uncertainty and then to knowledge, non so [I do not know] refers to unknowledge; non so se [I do not know whether], mi sa [to me it knows], credo [I believe] and penso [I think] to uncertainty; so [I know] to knowledge; • mi sa [to me it knows], credo [I believe] and penso [I think] are synonyms from an epistemic perspective; • non so se [I do not know whether] is much more uncertain than mi sa [to me it knows], credo [I believe] and penso[I think]. These four epistemic markers seem to occupy a different position along the uncertainty continuum ranging between two poles: doubt (high uncertainty - non so se p [I do not know whether p]) and belief (low uncertainty - mi sa [to me it knows], credo [I believe] and penso [I think] that p)
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