We conclude that verbal hallucinations can be fruitfully considered to be a genus of inner speech. Pragmatics can be used as a framework to distinguish verbal hallucinations in different populations.

In this article, we use the concept of `dialogical network' systematically to analyse hostilities towards refugees and asylum seekers in the UK and their effects on refugees' and asylum seekers' biographical self-presentations and psychological adjustment. We find that hostility towards refugees took different forms which were in part contingent on contemporary social and political activities. We also found that all our refugee and asylum-seeker informants constructed their identities around hostilities expressed towards them in the media and by the local inhabitants. In particular, their identities were constructed in terms of biographical contrasts that made the grounds of contemporary hostile rejections false and irrelevant to themselves. Most refugee/asylum-seeker informants in our study experienced psychological problems and attributed these to enforced idleness.

Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the client's talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the client's circumstances.But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer interpretations. We offer an analysis of formulations (both of the gist of the client's words and of their implications) that are diagnostic: that is, used by the professional to sharpen, clarify or refine the client's account and make it better able to provide what the professional needs to know about the client's history and symptoms. In doing so, these formulations also have the effect of shepherding the client's account towards subsequent therapeutic interpretation. In a coda, we notice that sometimes the formulations are designed discreetly. We examine one such discreet formulation in detail, and show how its very ambiguity can lead to its failure as a diagnostic probe.

This article concerns the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. We use Membership Categorization Analysis to establish how the key figures involved in the conflict represented these events and the participants in them. We analyse public addresses made soon after the attacks by the US President George W. Bush, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden of Al Qaeda. Each speaker distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ and formulated this distinction so as to justify past violent actions and to prepare grounds for future ones. Bush and Blair both distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ in social, political and moral terms, whereas bin Laden did so in religious terms. The categorizations were not done in isolation from each other, but were instead networked. We discuss the relation between membership categorizations, presentations of happenings and violent actions, prior and subsequent and we extend our concept of a ‘dialogical network’.