Impoliteness And Power In Chinese Outpatient Context

Due to the shortage of modern medical resources and the increasing need for good medicare, contradictions emerge between doctors and patients. “Black-hearted doctor” and “medical trouble” become the foci of social news. Mutual trust between doctors and patients starts to collapse. Against this background, this study focuses on the “impolite” language in the medical context and strives to figure out its working pattern, functions and inner relationship with an influencing factor—power.Firstly, this study looks into previous researches concerned with impoliteness and power, and finds that(1) although impoliteness survives the freezing period and becomes the focus of pragmatics now, it still calls for applied research under the medical environment, and(2) it is universally acknowledged that impoliteness and power are interwoven with each other, but their inner relationship still remains unclear.Based on Culpeper’s and Bousfield’s impoliteness theory, together with French and Raven’s power bases, this study analyzes 50 typical cases from among 100 natural medical conversations and attempts to answer the following four questions:(1) How does impoliteness work in the medical context?(2) What are the functions of doctors’ and patients’ impoliteness strategies?(3) What are their respective power bases when doctors and patients launch impoliteness strategies?(4) What is the inner relationship between impoliteness strategies and power bases in the medical context?The findings are as follows:(1) Culpeper’s and Bousfield’s impoliteness theory help to understand the universality of impoliteness in institutional discourse, the asymmetry of impoliteness between doctors and patients, and the elusiveness of impoliteness due to common institutional goals;(2) Impoliteness has four functions in the medical context, namely institutional, affective, coercive and entertaining functions, some of which could be rather positive for the whole consulting process;(3) Doctors are equipped with more power bases than patients, in which legitimate, informational, expert and coercive power are most frequently seen and closely interwoven, while patients mainly rely on informational and legitimate power;(4) Among all the power bases, informational and coercive power are more likely to induce on-record impoliteness, while legitimate and expert power are inclined to be relied on in off-record impoliteness.It is strongly recommended(1) to make proper uses of impoliteness strategies so as to better achieve purposes in medical consultations, and(2) to balance the power between doctors and patients by setting up channels for patients’ complaints and suggestions, publicizing medical knowledge, reducing the chance for doctors to use impoliteness strategies by leveraging them more time and space with the aim of offering better medical service.