Recent years have seen much discussion on the use and meaning of typological argumentation when reconstructing language history and language relations. We address the conclusions and methodology of a paper "Structural phylogenetics and the reconstruction of ancient language history" (Science, Sept. 23, 2005), which claims that, on the basis of a typological comparison, the non-Austronesian languages and (Austronesian) Oceanic spoken to the imediate east of new Guinea can be shown to belong to two unrelated genetic entities. We argue that the data and disucssion in this paper do not allow us to conclude that the non-Austronesian languages in the study form a valid linguistic group in any hisotircal sense, or that the methods they apply can be used to make claims about lingquistic relatedness.

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Indonesia is a large nation in terms of both geography and population, and a very large number of languages are spoken within its territory. Historically, multilingualism was and is the norm in many parts of the archipelago, and common even in areas where one language dominates. The emergence of a unitary state with a national language after World War 2 has exerted pressure towards greater uniformity, but the shifts which are taking place are best viewed as changing patterns of multilingualism, rather than as shifts of large populations from one language to another. Such shifts in patterns of language use are occurring throughout the nation, and are resulting in threats to the viability of some languages, especially in the eastern part of the archipelago where there are many languages with small speaker populations. The size of the language groups in the east also has consequences for language maintenance. Although official policy recognises the right of different language groups to maintain their languages and cultures, resources for such activities are scarce and the large ethnolinguistic communities in the west, where several languages have speaker numbers in the millions, have been more successful in accessing resources and institutional support which assist language maintenance. In contrast, speaker groups in the eastern part of Indonesia have limited access to resources available for language maintenance, although recent funding initiatives by organisations based in Europe have at least assisted in drawing attention to the problems faced in that region.

We examine a dataset consisting of 11 International Medical Graduates (IMGs) performing an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Our aim is to address questions about the linguistic realization of empathy in the clinical discourse of IMGs and the extent to which OSCE examiners are sensitive to relevant features of the discourse. We analyse three aspects of the dataset as manifestations of empathy: sequential organization to provide reassurance; responsiveness to the simulated patient's lexical choices for emotionally charged words; and the organization of turn-taking in the interaction. Our analysis suggests that in each of these areas it is possible to identify discourse strategies which realize empathy. These strategies are used by IMGs who are good communicators and not used by poor communicators. Our evidence suggests that of the features we examine, the most salient for the examiner is a greater than normal occurrence of transition pauses. We argue that it is only in the area of the organization of conversation that the problems displayed by some IMGs are due to differences in cultural background, and it is therefore significant that the feature we identify as salient comes from this area.Keywords: empathy; discourse analysis; reassurance; division of work; International Medical Graduate (IMG); OSCE BackgroundAustralia, like many other Western countries (Birrell 1996;Birrell and Hawthorne 2004), relies heavily on international medical graduates (IMGs) to provide medical care to its growing population (Han and Humphreys 2006). These IMGs bring to Australian medical institutions a considerable diversity in their background training, clinical skills, understanding of the health system and communication skills (McGrath 2004;Whelan 2006). IMGs' professional knowledge, lay-cultural knowledge, socio-cultural assumptions, institutional norms and values, and personal experiences are all in full display in medical events (Sarangi and Roberts 1999;Roberts and Sarangi 2002;Candlin and Candlin 2003;Roberts et al. 2003Roberts et al. , 2004. A lack of commonality in the participants' inferences and contextual cues may affect the interpretative schema and therefore the comprehension of speech (Gumperz 1971(Gumperz , 1982(Gumperz , 1999 between IMGs and their patients, potentially causing miscommunication in medical visits. Such communication difficulties can have a negative effect on patients' satisfaction in the consultation. 1 This paper addresses some of the communication difficulties that IMGs face during medical consultations by examining how diverse discourse features were used by IMGs to articulate an empathic stance during an OSCE (objective structured clinical examination) and the extent to which the assessor's rating seems to be sensitive to these discourse features. The data we consider here was taken from a training session for IMGs preparing for the actual Australian Medical Council examination. In this case a medical practitioner played the role of the patient. The OSCE scenario assess...