'Don't Get Caught Out': Pragmatic and Discourse Features of Informative and Promotional Texts in International Healthcare Insurance

This paper examines the pragmatic and discourse features of a number of multimodal international health-care insurance texts. The texts contain specialized language related to the provision and treatment of healthcare and to insurance coverage and are aimed at a fairly well-defined target readership, many of them actual or potential expatriates. They thus serve a useful function, that of providing the readership with an informed and comprehensible guide to the services and products available. Some of them have a more strictly promotional aspect, that of advertising specific insurance policies. In particular, the paper focuses on the language choices favoured by these texts and the strategies they serve, noting that the distinction between their informative and promotional dimensions is not always clear-cut. It further suggests that the writers of these texts make a specific use of discourse features and languaging strategies in order to achieve their rhetorical purposes.