An Analysis Of The Conversational Structure In Doctor-Patient Conversations

The study of conversational structure has aroused heated discussions over decades since mentioned by Sacks in the 1960s and developed by Goffman (1981) with the influence of the ethnomethodological concerns. Verschueren (1995) put forward that conversation structure is"a radical research program designed to investigate the levels of social order that could be revealed in the everyday practice of talking". These scholars have not only proposed the theories but also made a large quantity of researches to investigate face-to-face conversations, among which doctor-patient conversations are found typical. Dissatisfaction often occurs between the parties involved and studies have found that it mostly results from their ways of speaking.This thesis aims to investigate the conversational structure of doctor-patient conversations within the framework of Conversation Analysis, that is, to find the underlying mechanism lying in doctor-patient conversations through the analysis of the opening, main body, closing, turn-taking mechanism, backchannels, and adjacency pairs.In the present study, audio samples of doctor-patient conversations were collected in four representative hospitals in Shandong Province. Through the analysis of collected data from the perspective of Conversation Analysis, this thesis finds that the conversational structure in doctor-patient conversations mostly falls into three categories: turn-taking mechanism, backchannels, and adjacency pairs. As to turn-taking mechanism,"word and sentence"as the turn-constructional component, outweigh other components; symbols like"嗯""哎""啊""噢"(roughly translated as"Er","Yes","Ah","Oh") as the backchannel, are utilized more frequently. Moreover,"greeting-greeting"and"farewell-farewell"pairs are omitted in adjacency pairs while the"question-answer"pairs permeate through.This thesis holds certain implications. Investigating the conversational structure of doctor-patient conversations can further supplement and enrich the theories as well as relevant linguistic studies. Moreover, the authentic data analyzed in this thesis will enlarge the corpus of the study on doctor-patient conversations, and arouse the attention to the structure of the doctor-patient conversations, which will shed light on improving the relationship between doctors and patients to achieve the win-win outcomes.