The subtle juncture cues in older varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation can be difficult for speakers of new English varieties to perceive. This study looks at the perception of word juncture characteristics in three varieties of English (British, Hong Kong and Singapore) amongst British, Hong Kong and Singaporean listeners in order to widen our understanding of English juncture c...

providing analytical and social tools, critical discourse analysis (henceforthcda) can be used to unravel the hidden ideologiesas well as biases in the websof discursive practices involved in texts. in this paper, the van leeuwen’s (1996)cda framework is used to analyze an article from a british broadsheet newspaper,the guardian. to have a more detailed analysis, eleven elements are chosen from...

this paper examined disagreement in two sets of data in the context of service encounters: problem-solving interactions (doctor-patient communication) and purchase-oriented encounters (pharmacies) from a cross-cultural perspective (spanish-british english). we proposed assertiveness, a term that refers to both socio-psychological and linguistic features of communication, as a concept that may h...

due to the british hegemony of iran in both pre- and post-constitutional revolutionary periods (1906-1911), the iranian legal system was expected to be influenced by british common law following the establishment of the modern government after the revolution. but it did not happen for various legal and non-legal reasons. a major legal reason could be iranians’ long history of acquaintance with ...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown markedly lower birth weight among infants of South Asian origin compared with those of White European origin. Whether such differences mask greater adiposity in South Asian infants and whether they persist across generations in contemporary UK populations is unclear. Our aim was to compare birth weight, skinfold thickness and cord leptin between Pakistani ...

this commentary on the editorial ‘the politics and analytics of health policy’ by professor calum paton focuses on two issues. first, it points to the unclear links between ideas, ideology, values, and discourse and policy, and warns that discourse is often a poor guide to enacted policy. second, it suggests that realism, particularly ‘programme theory’ are useful tools for health policy analys...

Viagra use among British nightclubbers, a sentinel population of illicit drug users, was first reported in 1999. There has since been little attention paid to the evolution of patterns of non-prescribed use, apart from among men who have sex with men. Beginning in 1999 an annual survey has been conducted with a specialist dance music magazine, permitting cross-sectional comparisons over time. R...

At the end of 1984 a collaborative survey was carried out to determine the prevalence of infection with human T cell lymphotropic virus type III/lymphadenopathy associated virus (HTLV-III/LAV) and HTLV-I among 584 recipients of various blood products in Britain at that time. In 204 cases yearly point prevalence figures for infection were also obtained for 1978 to 1983. In 1984, 215 of 315 patie...

BACKGROUND Sexual health entails the absence of disease and the ability to lead a pleasurable and safe sex life. In Britain, ethnic inequalities in diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections (STI) persist; however, the reasons for these inequalities, and ethnic variations in other markers of sexual health, remain poorly understood. We investigated ethnic differences in hypothesised explanator...