An exploratory account of the register of nursing textbooks Can you nurse from them? Alexandra I. García Te University of Sydney Given the pressing issues that afect nursing education (e.g. higher attrition and plagiarism rates), this study aims to obtain initial insight on whether nursing textbooks meet the demands of their context of situation. Tese demands could be listed as: construing biomedical knowledge, establishing a pattern of evidence-based nursing practice and promoting the values of person-centred care. For this analysis, I draw on aspects of parameters of context developed by Hasan (2004), Butt (2004) and Matthiessen (2015), and relate them to their semantic and lexicogrammatical realisation across diferent metafunctions using corpus-based techniques and detailed manual analysis of short extracts. Te results may suggest that nursing textbooks may be meeting the demands of nursing as a research-based discipline but failing to model empathetic communication. Keywords: nursing textbooks, context of situation, register, generic structure, technicality, a research-based discipline, empathetic communication, construal of knowledge, epistemological stance, narrative 1. Introduction While undergraduate textbooks may be an undervalued register as compared to other scholarly registers (e.g. journal articles), they play a crucial role in building diferent types of disciplinary knowledge. To begin with, textbooks are a reposi- tory of well-established facts or theories of a discipline. Tis does not necessarily preclude them (or at least it should not) from introducing students to the dis- cipline’s epistemological stance, its ways of knowing and its attitude towards the construal of new knowledge. Tere is already some evidence of textbooks intro- ducing knowledge as contested and evolving (Hyland 2000; Love 2014). Further- more, and perhaps of more interest to the linguist, textbooks model the diferent https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00003.gar Language, Context and Text 1:1 (2019), pp. 39–64. issn 2589-7233 | e‑issn 2589-7241 © John Benjamins Publishing Company