Politeness and prosody in the co-construction of medical provider persona styles and patient relationships

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how politeness and prosody work in the construction of medical provider communicative styles. Data are taken from a corpus of audio-recorded and transcribed bilingual Spanish-English medical consultations in a community clinic in the United States. Through discourse analysis and prosodic analysis, we demonstrate that particular linguistic features contribute to the construction of stances associated with two medical-provider particular communicative styles that we identify as an egalitarian communicative style and an authoritarian communicative style. We also indicate ways in which these communicative styles may impact patient health outcomes in the local clinical context. Implications include the need for further research that engages in fine-grained linguistic analysis to understand provider styles and their relationship to patient health outcomes.