A Pragmatic Study On Same-Turn Self-Repair In Chinese Medical Interaction

Nowadays in China, doctor-patient relationship is becoming tense and medical disputes happen from time to time. Many studies have shown that smooth medical interaction is the key to a positive doctor-patient relationship. Research on medical interaction has been thriving in areas of sociology, medicine, psychology, etc.; while research on medical interaction from linguistic perspective started relatively late and the output is relatively limited. Considering such inadequacy, the author attempts to adopt conversation analysis and to conduct a pragmatic study on the Chinese medical interaction. Combining quantitative analysis and qualitative description, the author explores the initiation techniques and repair strategies of the same-turn self-repair based on data from Chinese medical conversations. Moreover, the author pragmatically interprets the differences and similarities between doctors and patients in employing initiation techniques and repair strategies.By referring to previous studies on self-repair home and abroad, the author has analyzed data collected from a hospital, and drawn the following conclusions. Firstly, same-turn self-repair can be initiated by the following six initiation techniques, i.e. sound stretch, cut-off, search marker, repetition, pause and without separable initiator; seven repair strategies are identified in the data, namely, replacement, insertion, deletion, search, abortion, recycling and reformat. The findings are in agreement with the ones in previous literature. Secondly, different from previous studies, replacement is further divided into appropriateness replacement and error replacement in this thesis. The former can be classified into synonymy replacement, same-reference replacement, degree replacement and hyponymy replacement; the latter can be divided into two groups, phonetic error replacement and lexical error replacement. This classification advances the study on self-repair to a deeper level and it is an innovation which does not exist in the previous literature. The study has also interpreted the differences and similarities between doctors and patients in employing initiation techniques and repair strategies on the basis of the Adaptation Theory. It is proved that the use of same-turn self-repair is an adaptation to the contextual correlates. In most cases, the differences and similarities in the use of initiation techniques and repair strategies are not only adaptations to the medical context, but also adaptations to the asymmetric power relations between doctors and patients. While in other cases, doctors and patients adapt their utterances to their motivations.This thesis is of great significance for its theoretical contribution and practical application. The thesis focuses on the same-turn self-repair in Chinese medical interaction and its findings can help people gain not only a better understanding of naturally occurring conversation and institutional talk, but also more insight into the self-repair. Moreover, practical suggestions can be made to improve the doctor-patient relationship in China by pragmatically interpreting the medical interaction.