Conversation Analysis Of Doctor-Pregnant Verbal Interaction In Prenatal Consultation

Conversations between doctors and patients are a representative type of institutional discourse that are different from those which happen on a daily basis. Researchers for this type of conversations come from both linguistic and medical fields. With reference to the findings of previous researches, this thesis studies the physician-pregnant conversation in prenatal consultation by virtue of conversation analysis.The conversation analysis school which carries out studies on conversations, was initiated by Harvey Sacks and other sociologists, Emanuel Schegloff and Grail Jefferson in the 1960s. It lays great emphasis on language characteristics which repeatedly occur in the raw language materials widely collected under natural circumstances, showing that spoken language rather than written language is being studied exclusively by this school.It was daily conversations that were originally studied in conversation analysis. Institutional conversations which take place against the backdrop of institutes were not studied by researchers until the 1970s. Doctor-patient conversations which happen in medical institutes became a subject of research naturally. Both foreign and domestic researchers have set foot in this field, but compared with researches in other countries, domestic researches started much later and studies on conversations between the two parties in a particular department are extremely rare.Therefore, with corpora collected in the maternity clinic of a three-level of first-class hospital in Hengyang as source materials, based on conversation analysis, this paper probes into turn-taking mechanism, sequence organization and repair mechanism of the doctor-pregnant conversation in medical visits and three findings are drawn. Firstly, during their conversations, the pregnant are more likely to have more turns than doctors compared with general doctor-patient conversation. Secondly, in terms of three kinds of objectives of the pregnant's going to see a doctor, there are three patterns for the overall organization of their conversations, respectively expressing intentions---(suggestion request/proposal)---informing to pay the fees (closing); opening---problem presentation---history taking and physical examination---diagnosis---treatment recommendations---closing or expressing purposes--explaining the check results---doctors' providing advice---(suggestion request/proposal)--closing. The micro-organization with priority given to suggestion sequence majorly features the ways of expression for seeking recommendations and non-minimal post-expansions to the suggestion sequences. Thirdly, the types of repair in their conversations are classified as follows. The type of repair of doctors'discourse includes self-initiation self-repair and other-initiation self-repair. And the repair type of the pregnant discourse includes self-initiation self-repair, other-initiation self-repair and other-initiation other-repair. Major repair strategies in their communication adopted by interlocutors range from replacement, repetition, reformulation, explanation, to deletion, of which the frequency of use decrements in the same order as listed. Then, based on the analysis mentioned above, the effects of doctor-pregnant conversations are evaluated. The positive effect is that after the confirmation of the pregnant purpose, the doctor will choose one set of pattern to develop their conversation and this improves the efficiency of their communication. The negative effect lies in that striking up a talk in accordance with a mode out of the three fixed patterns is likely to arouse the negligence of individual differences and the mechanization of conversation; besides, the power gap between the two parties has exerted adverse effects on their communication quality, either. Finally, in order to improve the quality of doctor-patient communication and targeted at the negative effect, the author puts forward proposals from the perspective of linguistics that the politeness principle and three requirements for speech encoding should be observed. All in all, the present study will help to improve the strained relations between the two sides and contributes to the establishment of a harmonious society.