| Death is inevitable.As China enters aging society,the number of studies on death discourse is increasing.Medical practitioners have more intuitive and diverse feelings about death because of their special professional nature as first-line witnesses of death.Appraisal Theory focuses on judging the values of language users by appraisal resources.There are three subsystems of Appraisal Theory,namely attitude system,graduation system and engagement system.Attitude system is the core of Appraisal Theory,expressing the appraiser’s affect and appraisal on people or things,and it has unique values for the study of death-themed discourse in medical narratives,especially for disclosing medical practitioners’ attitudes towards patients,illnesses,and death.The corpus for this study comes from the book The Impressive Death.The non-fiction novel includes 67 end-of-life patient events dictated by frontline clinicians.In this study,attitude system in Appraisal Theory is used as the theoretical framework,and attitude resources of death discourse in medical narratives are labeled and counted using the corpus annotation and the analysis software UAM Corpus Tool.On the basis of quantitative research and specific examples,each subclass of attitude resources in death discourse is discussed.In this study,appraisal resources contained in death discourse are annotated and encoded,and the method of combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis is adopted to analyze the distribution and use of appraisal resources.This study aims to answer the following three questions: Firstly,what are the characteristics of attitude resources of death discourse in medical narratives? Secondly,what are the attitudes of Chinese medical practitioners towards death revealed by the attitude resources? Thirdly,from the perspective of Positive Discourse Analysis,what are the implications of death discourse for medical treatment?The study finds that appraisal resources of death-themed discourse in medical narratives are mostly affect resources and judgment resources.These evaluations are made by medical practitioners regarding their patients,the patients’ conditions,and the patients’ dying process and death.This indicates that medical practitioners empathize with the pain and suffering that patients endure and have a personal understanding of the patients’ death,reflecting also their respect of life.The abundance of judgmental resources indicates that medical practitioners have their own unique judgments about death.In terms of the subcategories of attitude resources,the majority of death-themed discourse are negative attitude resources,which are the result of medical practitioners’ negative attitudes towards patients suffering from illness or those who are unable to receive medical treatment due to various constraints.However,it is worth noting that despite the depressing topic of death,positive attitude resources still account for nearly30% of medical practitioners’ death-themed discourse Positive affect,judgment,and appreciation resources account for approximately 26%,35%,and 39% respectively.Positive affect resources are mainly positive happiness and positive inclination.Positive judgment resources are mainly positive capacity and positive propriety.Positive appreciation resources are mainly positive reaction and positive valuation.This is due to some medical practitioners witnessing a few patients who bravely face their inevitable end and depart gracefully,which has made a deep impression on medical practitioners.Therefore,as far as this part of death-themed discourse is concerned,medical practitioners’ death-themed discourse of these patients and their death presents is rich in positive attitude resources.From the perspective of Positive Discourse Analysis,the attitude of medical practitioners to death shows the construction of their “Good Death”,which is enlightening for the medical view that China’s medical community should adopt in the future when facing incurable dying patients.That is to “cure sometimes,to relieve often,to comfort always”.This study explores the distribution characteristics of attitude resources in death-themed discourse in The Impressive Death,analyzes the causes of the distribution characteristics of attitude resources,and examines medical practitioners’ attitudes towards death.This study has some enlightening significance for future research in narrative medicine and medical practice from the perspective of Positive Discourse Analysis.Further analysis can be conducted from the engagement and graduation system of Appraisal System. |
PDF Full Text Request