Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied LinguisticsVol. 22:2 (1999) ► pp.35–50
Medical discourse in a hispanic environment
Power and simpatia under examination
This paper gives a preliminary insight into Hispanic medical discourse. It explores how a physician exercises power and simpatía in conversations with patients and it includes patients’ perception about good medical practice.
The focus is on the analysis of a conversation tape-recorded between the most popular and likeable doctor in the clinic and a female patient. This interaction is compared with the results obtained from a semi-structured interview aiming to discover if this medical exchange represents what patients have identified as positive medical behaviour.
The Hispanic data demonstrate that the doctor uses a variety of strategies in the exchange in order to show both his medical knowledge and his linguistic competence in expressing simpatía in discourse. The latter helps to create a pleasant atmosphere in an interaction in which the doctor’s use of the language is paramount.
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2009. Medical Discourse. Annual Review of Anthropology 38:1 ► pp. 199 ff.
[no author supplied]
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