Digital Framing in End-of-Life Communication: Constructing “Good Death” Support in the Discourse of Hospice Care Institutions in the UK and Hong Kong

Background: Hospice refers to specialised end-of-life care that supports patients and families, making it an important area for studying how language shapes experiences and expectations of care. This study compares hospice discourse on websites in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, analysing how NLP-based sentiment and interpersonal features, such as personal pronouns and conjunctions, shape logical relations, structure information, and express emotion in patient narratives. Methods: Using a mixed approach that integrates sentiment analysis with Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and taxonomy of conjunctions in particular, this study draws on a 52,086-word corpus from 40 hospice websites (20 from each region). The corpus analytical tool AntConc was used to identify co-occurrence, interpret log-likelihood, and perform concordance analysis. Results: The findings reveal significant differences in the digital delivery of hospice care across regions. According to our data, UK websites tend to express a wider range of personal emotions and frequently use concessive conjunctions when discussing sensitive palliative care topics. In contrast, Hong Kong websites tend to use more additive and causal conjunctions, projecting a stronger focus on institutional care. For example, Hong Kong texts tend to use formal, service-oriented connections such as “we + offer”, reflecting a more informational communicative style. However, both regions frequently use personal pronouns such as “you” and “we” to convey positive sentiment and demonstrate empathy towards patients and their caregivers. Conclusion: These patterns appear to be used strategically by hospice providers to build trust, signal alignment, and strengthen relationships tailored to each region. Lastly, this study makes an original contribution by combining computational and functional linguistic approaches to develop a systematic method for examining culturally shaped digital communication in end-of-life contexts, thereby enriching the field of healthcare discourse analysis.