Hedges In Doctor-Patient Conversation As A Pragmatic Strategy

In recent years, the medical system in China has been undergoing great transformation with the reinforcement of the concept of "patient-centeredness". But fundamental changes of the doctor-patient relationship will not be completed in a short time. At present, the doctor-patient relationship at home has not arrived at the ideal level. The patients are dissatisfied with the doctors’ cold attitudes while the doctors complain about the patients’ mistrust or misunderstandings. The main cause for this phenomenon is that the current doctor-patient communication is not satisfactory. Therefore, doctor-patient conversation, as a very important part of the doctor-patient communication, attracts much attention from the domestic linguistic researchers who attempt to examine various kinds of language phenomena in doctor-patient conversation within the framework of linguistic theories. Their researches focus on explaining the generation mechanism of the varied linguistic expressions and exploring their pragmatic functions, which may make great contribution to easing and improving the doctor-patient relationship.Large quantities of domestic studies on hedges have been conducted since its introduction into China in the late1970s. However, hedges in doctor-patient conversation have only been explored in few researches mainly based on the Conversational Analysis, Politeness Principle, Cooperative Principle and Face Theory. This paper, based on real recordings of doctor-patient conversation, analyzes and explores the adaptation process of hedges appearing in the doctor-patient conversation from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics and also generalizes their pragmatic effects. From the analysis, the author concludes that hedges in doctor-patient conversation are actually the outcome of linguistic choices interadaptable with doctors’and patients’ social world, mental world and physical world. Moreover, doctors and patients employ hedges in order to gain their specific pragmatic effects, such as increasing the objectivity of the doctors’ diagnosis, making the patients’ disease narrative more precise and so on. The application of the adaptation theory in this research can interpret doctors’ and patients’ motivation and purpose of using hedges.The result of the present study is significant in several aspects. First, this study carries out an pragmatic adaptation analysis on the motivation and purpose of doctors’ and patients’process of using hedges, which contributes to understanding each party’s communicative strategies thoroughly so as to promote the doctor-patient communication, to optimize the doctor-patient relationship, to improve the doctors’ humanistic care for the patients and finally to achieve better communicative effectiveness. Besides, the data on doctor-patient conversation studied in this thesis enrich the scope of data for the study on doctor-patient conversation and further expand the application scope of Pragmatic Adaptation Theory and relevant researches. Thus, the research conclusion of this study can advance the linguistic research and promote language learning and using in general.