A discussion of discourse patterns in the professional interactions of lawyers and physicians suggests that these encounters are programmatic exchanges to which the psycholinguistic rules of processing and inference can be applied. In these professions, the constraints of normal discourse patterns interact with the conventions of giving and…

This discussion of information structures in written texts describes how linguistic analysis of short published reports leads to the presentation of an algorithm that depicts the problem-solving process in terms of a series of evaluative questions. (Author/CHC)