Metaphors And Their Functions In Doctor-Patient Conversation

Metaphor is not only regarded as a rhetorical device,but also reflects a cognitive process.Metaphors are used in discourse analysis to explore how people conceptualize the real world.So far,application studies have explored metaphors in the discourse of politics,education,medicine,economy,and some other fields.Doctor-patient conversation is an important means to know about patient's current health condition and to help the doctor to diagnose and make subsequent medical decisions.Current research on interaction between the doctor and the patient has discussed the doctor's questioning,formulation,pragmatic strategies,sequential organization and generative mechanism of resistance and so on.The application of metaphor in the process of doctor-patient conversation has rarely been mentioned.In the limited discussion of metaphor in medical discourse,the focuses are mainly on the role that metaphor plays in psychotherapy and psychological counseling and strategies for applying metaphor to psychotherapy.Metaphor is a universal and effective method of counseling and is widely used in psychotherapy.Although psychiatrists and therapists are treating patients with similar diseases,the verbal interaction between psychiatrist and their patients has not been studied from a metaphorical perspective.The author recorded authentic doctor-patient conversations from a mental hospital in Jinan as the source of data.10 psychiatrists and 60 patients who suffered from some sort of mental disorders were the participants in this study.A total of 17 hours of conversations were recorded and then transcribed into 107 cases of conversations,among which 132 metaphor units were identified.This study mainly used qualitative method,supplemented by quantitative research method.After the transcription of all the recorded conversations,the author identified metaphor in doctor-patient conversation according to the differences between the basic meaning and textual meaning of words in the context.Metaphors were classified and encoded by its target domain and source domain.Then the functions of metaphor in doctor-patient interaction and the users of these metaphors were also divided into different categories such as suggestions and explanations,psychiatrists and patients,and patients' family members.Besides,the correlation between the target domain and the source domain,and correlation between functions of metaphor and its users were examined with Chi-squared tests.The results show that metaphors are used in psychiatrist-patient conversation.Psychiatrists use metaphor most frequently compared with patients and their family members.Secondly,metaphor is used to discuss a wide range of topics in psychiatrist-patient conversations.The selection of the target domain and the source domain indicates a strong correlation.Thirdly,metaphor takes on a lot of functions related to psychological counseling,such as description,explanation,summarization,suggestion and inquiry.These functions are related to the role of metaphor users in this context.The findings of this study help to enrich the empirical study of metaphor in doctor-patient interaction,as well as the linguistic theory on metaphor from a new perspective.In a practical sense,this study could be of benefit to both doctors and patients.On the one hand,it helps doctors raise their awareness in using metaphors and help them communicate with their patients more efficiently.On the other hand,patients and their family members could understand doctors' explanation and medical decisions more easily and accurately.In a word,it helps to better understand the role of metaphor in this specific medical context and provides insights for the development of doctor-patient interaction and psychiatric treatment.