Blurb:

Chapter 6 presents a networked description of how doctors and patients represent each other semantically as social agents or potential agents. The network, which develops work by van Leeuwen (esp. 1995, 1996) and others, draws together the key textual resources HIV patients and their doctors in this corpus appear to mobilise for construing and enacting agency in decision-making. In the second part of the chapter this framework is used to explicate the dynamic negotiation of agency and of particular treatment choices in extended text extracts, focusing especially the divergence and convergence between speakers and their perspectives from moment to moment, and the cumulative result.