Interpersonal Pragmatic Study Of Online Doctors’ Mitigation

Since the mitigation was proposed in the 1980 s,it has attracted the attention for many scholars.After it was introduced into the field of linguistics,its research value in pragmatics has gradually become a hot spot for scholars at home and abroad.Although there are many researches on the functions of mitigation,pragmatic strategies,etc.,especially its interpersonal pragmatic function is the current hotspot.However,many researchers use English corpus as the research object,while the Chinese corpus do not involve too much.Online medical consultation has both text and voice chat,which is enough to study the mitigation from the perspective of Chinese.In addition,the model of online medical consultation is an emerging medical consultation method.It is urgent to establish a harmonious doctor-patient relationship in the model of ‘Internet+ medical’.Therefore,the study on the use of mitigation used by Chinese doctor from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics is helpful to explore the effectiveness of mitigation in online consultations,and is also conducive to promoting the harmonious relationship between doctors and patients.This thesis uses Li Haihui’s classification of mitigation as the standard,and the model of Rapport-Management Theory proposed by SpencerOatey is employed as the theoretical basis.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis and discourse analysis,800 pieces of doctors’ discourse are collected(from https://dxy.com/)to conduct an empirical study to answer the following three research questions:(1)What mitigation strategies do Chinese doctor use in online consultation?(2)How do these mitigation strategies follow the model of RapportManagement Theory?(3)What interpersonal pragmatic functions of mitigation strategy employed by Chinese online doctors in online consultation?Through the analysis of data and extracts,the following conclusions are drawn from the study:Firstly,the frequency of mitigation strategy reveals that there exists clear difference among the occurrence of mitigation strategies used by Chinese doctors in online consultation.In addition,from the percentage of the occurrence of the mitigation,it is also clear to see that perlocutionary mitigation is the most frequent strategy in these three strategies.In a word,the use of perlocutionary is more frequent than locutionary mitigation and illocutionary mitigation.According to the Ching-Square test,there exists obvious deviation between the frequency of perlocutionary mitigation employed by Chinese doctors and the mean frequency of three types of mitigation strategies.This also shows that the use ratio of perlocutionary mitigation is higher than that of the other two types of mitigation.Secondly,according to the result,Chinese doctors have harmoniousorientation when consulting online.The Chinese doctors follow the model Rapport-Management theory.In other words,the mitigation used by online doctors does not violate the face management and social rights management proposed by Spencer.Finally,the mitigation used by online doctors can produce these three interpersonal pragmatics functions: shorten the emotional distance,achieve interpersonal persuasion,and generate pragmatic empathy.These are all helpful to build a harmonious doctor-patient relationship.In a word,the thesis can not only enrich theoretical research,but it also provides a reference for online and offline medical consultations to communicate with patients,and helpful to improve the current situation of doctor-patient tension.