An Interpersonal Pragmatic Study Of Moderators In Doctor-patient Interaction Conversations

As an important language expression strategy,mitigation has metapragmatic function,which can be used to enhance the effectiveness of what the speaker says and does to the listener.From interpersonal pragmatics perspective,this study combined with rapport management theory and Haihui Li’s trichotomy of mitigation,forming analysis framework of mitigation in doctor-patient interaction.Meanwhile,through qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis of the corpus,this study tries to explore the motivations,classification,and interpersonal functions of mitigation in doctor-patient interaction.This study aims to broaden the research dimensions of mitigation and to give support for the construction of harmonious doctor-patient relationship.The study comes to conclusions as follows: firstly,due to the management of face,rights/obligations and interactional goals,doctor and patient will use different kinds of mitigation strategies,respectively are propositional mitigation,illocutionary mitigation and perlocutionary mitigation;secondly,in doctor-patient interaction,the interpersonal pragmatic functions of mitigation can be divided into three aspects,respectively are the realization of positive face management,the maintain of social rights and the establishment of harmonious doctor-patient relationship.