An Analysis Of Questions In Doctor-patient Dialogues: From A Critical Perspective

Over the last few decades, considerable attention has been paid to the study of institutional talk and extensive research has been conducted in particular to the doctor-patient interaction. Yet, it is only during the past ten years or so that research has been directed to the study of the details of doctor-patient communication that is marked by the "asymmetry" of power. Question, as an indispensible part in the making-up of the medical interaction, has been studied as a mechanism for doctors to control and dominate the medical conversation.Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a contemporary approach to the study of language and discourse in social institutions. It marks out a new set of methodological techniques and possibilities in linguistic research. As the central concern of CDA, power plays a vital part in the critical study of both written texts and spoken discourses.In spite of the abundant research on doctor-patient communication, relatively little attention has been given to the study of questions in the doctor-patient communication from a critical perspective, especially in the context of China. Attention to such a new perspective is of critical importance to the disclosing of uneven power in the medical interactions. Additionally, the tight relations between question and power also make the examination of the way how question exert power in doctor-patient dialogues a useful starting point for attaining a thorough understanding of doctor-patient communication. Thus, it becomes reasonable and also helpful to study the question in doctor-patient dialogues from a critical perspective. Based on Norman Fairclough' s Three Dimensional Framework and Van Dijk's ideological analysis framework for CDA, this thesis developed a new five-layered analytical tool, which is made up of such aspects as 'lexicon', 'syntax', 'semantics', 'pragmatics' and 'context' for the analysis of questions in the medical conversations in China. After a detailed analysis of the data from the personal blog on the internet, this thesis came to a conclusion that question, as a requisite component of doctor-patient interaction, often functions as the predominant and decisive force for doctors to exert power over the patients.