Health on the net: the doctor answers

Abstract

This study is intended to provide new insights into web-based discourse on medical exchanges in doctor-patient communication. The global net system have certainly played an important role in the increase and the following modification of communication dynamics. However, in particular situation such as doctor-patient interviews, computer mediated communication is still a limit. This paper is based on two lines of research in language studies, namely the studies of language corpus and studies of communication in health encounters. The corpus is formed by the medical entries that appeared in biomedical/health service sites. The samples collected were analysed in order to find discourse patterns for structure and organization of moves together with their functional meaning. For each move, grammatical and lexical items were identified in order to assess the dimension of evidentiality, modality, and affect in online counseling. The framework of this study has been shaped by the typologies in Chafe (1986), Willett (1988), Van Auwera and Plungian (1998), Plungian (2001), Fitneva (2001) and Marìn Arrese (2002, 2004) on the roles and expression of evidentiality and modality in English. Emotive load is studied through the lexical analyses of emotions expressed in first person following the Appraisal Framework by Martin and White (2005).