ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social context of medical geriatrics, Christopher Candlin's perspective takes us to the heart of what we would want to achieve through discourse analysis. The 'institutional practices' here are most obviously those that define geriatrics as a distinct domain of medicine and social care, their presuppositions, their priorities, and their routines. The chapter explains the pronoun-indexed address and reference; we see a relational pattern develop early in the extract that is very untypical of the data as a whole. It analyzes the framing of participation in triadic consultation discourse is highly variable, across and within the extracts. The chapter examines how social frames are signaled by participants, and how agreement about which frame obtains conditions the nature of talk and the inferences participants draw from it. Frame management can be analyzed in the textual dimension because frames are often marked, through formal and functional elements of language.
