Apologies made by physicians for adverse medical events have been identified as a mitigating factor in whether patients decide to litigate. However, doctors are socialized to avoid apologies because apologies admit guilt and invite lawsuits. An "Apology Law," which specifies that a physician's apology is inadmissible in court, is written to encourage patient-physician communication. Building on...

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialog acts in conversational speech, i.e., speechact-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialog acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialog act sequence. The dialog model is based on treating the d...

We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speechact-like units such as STATEMENT,QUESTION, BACKCHANNEL,AGREEMENT, DISAGREEMENT, and APOLOGY. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue model is based on treating...

This is the second issue featuring a selected piece from the Yale Internal Medicine Residency Program's Writers' Workshop. The annual workshop began in 2003. Abraham Verghese and Richard Selzer, among the best known physician-writers in the United States, have served as workshop leaders, teaching the craft of writing to more than 35 residents. In designing the workshop, Anna B. Reisman, assista...

This study of the pragmatics of cross-cultural text messages throws light on the evolution of new hybrid forms of literacy and on the complex ways that culture is expressed and mediated in second language/ second culture contexts. An investigation was carried out into the pragmatics of apology in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) short messaging service text messages of adult Malay s...

When corporations are confronted with a crisis, well-crafted CEO apologies can serve to repair, restore, and rebuild damaged corporate image. In prior research, the use of linguistic resources exhibited in apology discourse for different crisis response strategies has not been sufficiently examined. Drawing on appraisal framework subsumed resources, this study analyzed discursive construction l...

Do people distinguish between sincere and insincere apologies? Because targets and observers face different constraints, we hypothesized that observers would differentiate between spontaneous and coerced apologies but that targets would not. In Studies 1 and 2 participants either received or observed a spontaneous apology, a coerced apology, or no apology, following a staged offense, and the pr...