A Study Of Doctor-Patient Conversation

In China, a large number of researches are found done from both ethic and psychological angle with plenteous result. However, researches done from linguistic angle are rare. The reason why we choose doctor-patient conversation as our object is as follows: 1 to complete the studies of conversation analysis through contrasting doctor-patient conversation with daily conversation and summarizing the specific characteristics of doctor-patient conversation; 2 hoping the result of our research will help to enlighten doctors on how to promote doctor-patient relationship by standardizing their language.This study is based on the empirical research method. By analyzing doctor-patient conversation collected from out-patient clinics, we first inspect the specific characteristics of doctor-patient conversation; then characteristics of both doctors'discourse and patients'presented in doctor-patient conversation; last we check the conclusion reached out by examining an individual case.In this essay, we first inspect the difference between doctor-patient conversation and daily conversation in subject, environment and purpose of the interaction, and therefore come to the conclusion that doctor-patient conversation is a kind of vertical conversation, namely power talk.Second, we make a further study of different characteristics of both doctors'discourse and patients'discourse presented under the influence of vertical conversation. In this part, we picked up 6 pairs of doctor-patient conversation randomly from the materials collected from out-patient clinics and regarded phenomenon like the totals of turns, the number of doctors'turns, the number of patients'turns; types of interruption, the totals of interruption, the number of doctors'interrupting patients, the number of patients'interrupting doctors, the totals of conversation repair, the number of doctors'self repair, the number of patients'self repair and other types of conversation repair from the quantitative point of view. According to the result of the analysis, namely the statistical data, we can safely draw the conclusion as follows: 1. doctors, as the power side in the interaction, take up more turns than patients, as the none-power side do. What's more, 41.1% of doctors'turns are made up of groups of sentences compared with only 28.3% in patients case. 2. as far as types of interruption are concerned, two points especially deserve our attention : one is that the percentage of successful single interruption in doctors'interrupting patients and patients'interrupting doctors; the other is that as far as doctors'interrupting patients is concerned, neither unsuccessful single interruption nor interjection is found . 3. features of question-answer structures. 4. doctors differ patients in choice of repair strategies.Third, we check the conclusion reached above out by analyzing an individual case.The result of the research enlightens doctors on how to promote doctor-patient relationship.The essay inspects doctor-patient interaction from linguistic point of view, which is rarely found in previous works.