Introduction

This chapter outlines approaches to top-down cognitive modelling and inferencing, and addresses functionally grounded work on affect. We describe each area and illustrate its potential for addressing questions in clinical discourse analysis. We also review recent work from neuroimaging and lesion studies to suggest some of the relevant neural systems. As usual, we draw on various disciplinary perspectives and theoretical models. Our practical motivation here is to use what works, and has potential for coding corpora in the various linguistic contexts and situations encountered doing clinical discourse analysis.

Cognitive models in general characterize information bundles of various kinds. Perhaps the most familiar are those used to represent words or word-like concepts. Models for words may be more or less detailed depending on the tolerance for elaboration within a particular framework, but morphosyntactic class, inflection and distribution features are typically indicated. How a word is pronounced – its phonological form and regular phonetic variants – will be spelt out in phonological and phonetic representations. Semantic features are often specified only at superordinate levels as in THING/EVENT or merely indexed through the use of the ‘CAPS-for-concept’ convention. Thus, the model for the lexeme ‘cat’ will include the information that it is a common count noun, with the inflectional and distributional features of this class – it can occur as head of a noun phrase and it inflects for plural number /s/. It is pronounced /kæt/.