Exploring Language Features Of Chinese Doctor-Patient Relationships Through Medical Interviews: A Discourse Perspective

Doctor-patient communication is an important area of research in the field of English for Specific Purposes. Scholars abroad have conducted a lot of systematic empirical studies but it is still a new area for Chinese linguists. Rarely are there any papers on the topic published in linguistic journals. However, in the field of medicine, on the basis of foreign research outcomes by sociologists and linguists, quite a few medical papers propose measures for improving system construction and doctor-patient relationship in Chinese hospitals, whose case, as a matter of fact, is sometimes different.Based on recorded conversations among 7 doctors and 52 patients and interviews of several doctors in 6 well-known hospitals of Ningbo and Hangzhou, this thesis, from the discourse perspective, discusses chiefly three aspects of doctor-patient interactions: 1. to analyze the genre of doctor-patient consultation and give support for Mishler's model; 2. through classifying and analyzing questions asked by both the doctors and the patients, and to measure to which extent the interactions are doctor-centered or patient-centered; 3. to explore and compare differences between medical language and everyday language.