18. Pragmatics and medical discourse
1. Introduction
This chapter seeks, on the one hand, to explore how patient and healthcare provider voices are enacted within a range of contexts in which medical discourse takes place and, on the other hand, to evaluate the contribution of pragmatics to an understanding of the many complexities that characterise communication in healthcare settings. The focus of the chapter will be primarily on spoken, rather than written discourse and on so-called frontstage encounters (Goffman 1959, Sarangi and Roberts 1999, Roberts 2006) between patients and healthcare providers as this reflects the preponderance of extant research which has drawn on pragmatics. However, reference will be made to studies ...
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