ABSTRACT

The final analysis chapter, Chapter 7, shifts focus to consider the 11.5 million words of NHS providers’ responses. The initial analysis of this part of the data reveals an interesting phenomenon – the fact that many of the providers’ replies were in fact wholly or partly copies of other responses in the dataset, indicating that NHS providers regularly use the same message to reply to multiple patients. We thus split the analysis into two sections; the first examines a sub-corpus of the cut and pasted ‘stock replies’; then, second looking separately at the ‘unique’ messages, or those that only occur once in the corpus. We examine the extent to which the ‘unique’ messages contain a more personalised use of language and the ‘copied’ ones a more formal and impersonal style, as well as considering issues around the use of market discourse in these responses and the ways that providers use language to manage negative feedback.