Blurb:

Conceptually, the four perspectives approach is seen as a “common lore approach” (Bolton, 2014: 182) to case formulation, a micro-genre of case reporting as utilised in psychology/psychiatry. Its main aim is to detail the case, along with its precipitating factors and follow-up treatment, continuously emphasizing the uniqueness of the case (Sim, Gwee & Bateman, 2005: 290). In this chapter, this discipline-specific generic macro-scheme will be drawn upon as a tool to study the specialised discourse of clinical-diagnostic case reporting from an applied perspective. It will be shown that although the two micro-genres represent two conceptually different disciplines, the emphasis on the individual patient can be seen as a common ground and can be translated into particular linguistic resources, which may be of interest in the context of Language for Specific Purposes courses. This analysis is made possible thanks to a qualitative approach to the data, combined with some insights from a computer-aided analysis of the corpus, which consists of case reports derived from the prestigious Lancet journal.