An Empirical Study On Modal Meanings Of Doctor-patient's Conversations

The meta-function of language has divided into three large parts: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Among these three main parts of Systemic Functional Grammar, interpersonal function means the people use language to build and maintain relationship. People use language to express the reality world. At the same time, people express their attitudes, opinions, deductions and intentions, or try to influence others'attitudes and behaviors. In this field, the interpersonal meaning is expressed by modality system.The modality meaning is always a hot topic in linguistic research. But most of its studies only limited in the field of modality verbs and auxiliary words. Recently, lots of linguists have done the modality research for the textual just like literature, News, advertisement, laws and the conversation between teacher and students, while it attaches a little to the doctor-patient's conversation. This thesis takes doctor-patient's conversation as research subjects. Considering different department will have its own distinction, this thesis has made a special selection of expert outpatient department as a study point.This thesis focuses on the purpose to show how the interpersonal function can be realized by modality system. Through the data collection of doctor-patient's conversation, it can make collections authentically and validity of this study. According to the data analysis, author first analyzes the language feature of doctors, patients and doctor-patient's interaction. The findings show us doctors are in providing an active position when they provide medical help, while most patients are in a poor position. Patients always are in a passive position because of the shortage of medical knowledge. In the whole conversation analysis, the participants of conversation are in an unbalanced state. These existing problems have a close relation with doctor-patient's contradictory. The studies find out that the most modality expressions in doctor-patient's conversation are implicit. The language of doctors and patients would use modality words help to express their opinions effectively and to realize dialogue purpose. According to the analysis, different choosing of modality words will influence the conversation results. The modality meaning of possible words and suggestion words will be more acceptable by patients. These kinds of words are more negotiable. As for the speech act, patients can more accept this kind of expression. While the necessary modality words have less acceptable than the former. This kind of expression contains coerciveness and commanding colors. In speech act, this type will arise the patients'disgustedness. Patients cannot take this expression facility. According to the foregone studies and data analysis, author proposed some suggestions for doctor-patient's conversation from linguistic field. Through the detail studies on doctor-patient's language constructions, conversation skills will be proposed to ease increasingly tense relationship between doctor and patient. Understand the basic contraction of doctor and patient, this can prevent bad relationships. From the deep studies on doctor-patient's conversation, author makes a contrast with daily conversation and finds the similarities and differences. This can provide a framework to the analysis of daily conversation.