In-Between discourse and genre: doctor-patient interaction in online communication. Formal and informal features in CMC

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based study which investigates the genre of medical e-exchanges between doctors and medical website users. Three conversational routines (greetings, politeness, formal and informal linguistic features) are analyzed. The framework of the study is what some researchers refer to as net linguistics (Posteguillo, 2003) consisting of the linguistic study of CMC. The findings indicate that health posts are a relatively informal type of d/p interaction which is largely influenced by e-mails and chat conventions.