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Part of
Relationships in Organized Helping: Analyzing interaction in psychotherapy, medical encounters, coaching and in social media
Edited by Claudio Scarvaglieri, Eva-Maria Graf and Thomas Spranz-Fogasy
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 331] 2022
► pp. 221–242

Practices of relationship building in Hungarian primary care

Communicative styles and intergenerational differences

| Eötvös Lorand University Budapest
| Ghent University

Using data from Hungarian primary-care consultations, we present linguistic features of relationship-building, focusing on the role of address forms and metapragmatic reflections. We also investigate intergenerational differences and different styles of managing doctor-patient relationships. Based on a range of evidence (discourse about doctor-patient communication in the public and in academia, participant observation of consultations, interviews with practitioners, analysis of instructional videos, questionnaire surveys), we discuss a change in doctor-patient communication at both macro (socio-cultural) and micro (interactional) levels. Factors influencing this process include general social change, digitisation and the communicative training of healthcare professionals. We conclude that physicians build different types of relationships with language, which hints at an overall shift in Hungarian society and in healthcare communication in general.

Keywords: relationship-building, primary care, metapragmatic reflection, attitude deixis, relationship styles
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Relationship-building in doctor-patient consultation
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Relationship-building in doctor-patient communication: Attitudinal deixis and metapragmatic actions
    • 4.1Attitudinal deixis
    • 4.2Metapragmatic comments and relationship-building
  • 5.Changes in relationship-building
    • 5.1Changes of communicative practice: Intergenerational aspect
    • 5.2Change in style: physician- and patient-centred communicative patterns
  • 6.Conclusions and limitations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.331.10kun
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