In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor- patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic resources when describing chronic pain, narrating symptoms, and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions.

The present study uses corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine the role of modality in policy verb phrases, using California opioid policies as a case study. By tracking the behavior of permissive and restrictive modals across time, this study highlights two potential discourse functions of modals in policy drafting: (i) to reflect the gravity of the issues on the ground, and (ii) to express permission and restriction by highlighting and deemphasizing a policy's suggestive intent, respectively. This study shows that the increased use of restrictive modality has significant positive correlations with California's worsening opioid crisis and its rising fatalities. A closer examination of state policy amendments reveals that altering policy modals has the potential to either broaden or limit the terms of existing policies. Informed by Van Dijk's “context models,” this study provides a cogent applied corpus linguistics framework for analyzing policy text and offers both political and linguistic perspectives into our understanding of modals and how communities address epidemics, respectively.