The Pragmatic Analysis Of 那 Used By Chinese Doctors

This research is a pragmatic study of the discourse marker (DM)é‚£used by doctors in medical consultations from the Relevance Theory (RT) perspective. Though research on DMs has attracted many scholars' attention both at home and abroad in recent years, it appears that little has been done on the use of DMs by the doctors. The aim of the present study is to identify the grammatical, semantic and functional properties of the DMé‚£in the medical consultation in the hope of answering the following questions: (1) What are the classifications of the markeré‚£used by the doctor? (2) What are the pragmatic functions of the markeré‚£employed by the doctor to manage the consultation? (3) How is the markeré‚£used by the doctor to guide the patient's interpretation?After reviewing the previous researches on DMs, particularly the three approaches: Coherence-based Approach, Grammatical-pragmatic Approach and Relevance Approach, the paper has adopted the relevance-theoretic perspective because of its relatively scientific and complete analyzing mechanism. In the framework of RT, DMs are seen as semantic constraints on the interpretation of medical consultations.The DMé‚£appears significantly frequently in the doctor's utterances in contrast with those of the patient and is chosen to be analyzed in terms of its uses and functions in the medical consultation. Using the theoretical framework of RT, we analyzed a corpus of about 75 tokens ofé‚£identified in 38 medical consultations. They are found to occur in sentence-initial, turn-initial and turn-medial places and classified as topic-related, inferential and divergence markers. Topic-related markers can mark the shifting or resumption of topics during the consultation. Inferential markers are used by the doctor to modify his speech act of directive or assertive by showing the inferential relations between the host utterance and antecedent. Divergence Markers express the doctor's emotion or attitude by signaling the doctor's divergence from the patient's prior expectation.The pragmatic functions of these three classes of the DMé‚£are analyzed on the basis of the medical data from the relevance-theoretic perspective. It is found that in the medical consultationé‚£is often employed by doctors to constrain patients' search for relevance. The picture varies with the three classes of the DM in terms of their general functions. Topic-related markers signal transitions of topics at the ideational level and that of frames at the interactional level. Inferential markers stress the content of the proposition at the ideational level and reinforce the illocutionary force of the speech act at the interactional level. Divergence markers are used to hedge the potential negative effects by prefacing the doctor's utterances expressing disagreement, criticism or other contradictory assumptions. These functions of the markeré‚£make doctors' communicative intention more manifest to patients and narrow down patients' search for relevance in medical interaction.Findings from this research shed light on how the DMé‚£helps the doctor to constrain the patient's interpretation and facilitate the smooth management of the medical consultation. This justifies the theoretical and practical necessity to analyze more DMs in various activity types.