Discourse in Medical Settings

Hundreds of millions of interactions take place every day in healthcare facilities around the world. Naturally, language plays a central role in all of them. Linguists and discourse analysts have explored this complex communicative scenario. In this paper, we have sought to describe some of the topics that have aroused most interest. The first is the development of specific linguistic corpora. We have illustrated some of them and proposed an essential bibliography to delve deeper into the subject. The second topic is specialized medical discourse, about which we carry out a basic characterization. The third issue is related to the interaction between patients and healthcare professionals. Models of interaction and either the presence or lack of communicative accommodation processes, as well as the interpretation of important concepts such as fatigue or hope, are dealt with in this section. The fourth issue is also related to the handling of the concepts of health, disease and illness. The last section is devoted to the management of the health crisis. We describe its structure and establish some ways of taking action.

Accommodation · Discourse analysis · Health care · Health professionals · Interpretation (philosophy) · Section (typography)