The Department of Linguistics is proud to announce that Emma Mileva will defend her PhD on Tuesday, March 27th, at 1 pm in LIB 2020.

Title: Language in alternative medicine sessions: A blend of discourse practices used in mainstream medicine and psychotherapy

Abstract:

This dissertation presents a descriptive study of discourse practices used in the context of a doctor-patient interaction found in alternative medicine sessions. The conventional doctor-patient encounter has been positioned in two separate domains – that of mainstream medicine and that of psychotherapy. Mainstream medicine offers modes of discourse mainly related to the physical problem of the patient and situated in a predominantly power relationship, while psychotherapy offers communicative activities focused on analyzing the human behaviour and psyche, and thus the language used is a result of a collaborative enterprise. Alternative medicine, on the other hand, is oriented toward a mind-body integration in which the mental state of the patient is considered a significant contributor to the illness (Larson 2007). Based on this philosophical background, I hypothesize that alternative medicine occupies a space between mainstream medicine and psychotherapy. I investigate this notion by exploring the mechanisms of elicitation and rapport, linguistically represented by four features generic to the two practices: speech acts, backchannels, joint productions, and repetitions. I apply conversation analysis to the data, which comes from nine recorded sessions between two alternative medicine doctors and their patients, native speakers of English. The corpus comprises 5,378 turns and 3,139 units of analysis in total for all dyadic conversations.

The strategic use of the four features contributes both to the sharing of power and co-creation of knowledge. Simultaneously with the conversational dominance (through questions), doctors accommodate and collaborate with patients (through backchannels, joint productions and repetitions). Reaching a diagnosis is often an incremental process in which doctors engage patients in an ongoing interactional meaning-making and shared knowledge. Thus, from the perspective of the study’s findings, alternative medicine discourse departs from medical interviews in that it exhibits a decreased conversational asymmetry. Furthermore, the patients ask on average more questions than what they are allowed in the majority of mainstream visits. The dialogue shows elements of psychologization exemplified by emotional narratives and self-disclosure by both parties. These characteristics suggest that we can indeed situate alternative medicine speech event between mainstream medicine and psychotherapy and therefore view it as a newly emerging institutional genre within medical discourse.

Key words: medical discourse; alternative medicine; conversation analysis; elicitation; rapport; patient-centred

Senior Supervisor:  Panayiotis Pappas
Co-supervisor: Maite Taboada
Supervisor: Suzanne Hilgendorf
Chair:  Keir Moulton
External/Internal Examiner:  Sharalyn Jordan
External Examiner:  Robyn Woodward-Kron, U. of Melbourne

This event is open to the public. Please join us!