Verbal engagement in doctor–patient interaction: Resonance in Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine

Abstract

This study provides a framework for assessing doctors' verbal engagement during medical consultations. It quantifies doctors' degrees of resonance (Du Bois, 2014), a form of interactional alignment (Pickering and Garrod, 2021) that occurs when speakers imitate and re-use words and constructions uttered by their interlocutors. Resonance often involves creativity and active participation in others’ speech, overtly signalling that what they said is relevant for continuing the interaction (Tantucci and Wang, 2021). We looked at Chinese naturalistic consultations and explored whether resonance produced by Chinese doctors with a background in Western medicine (WM) differs from Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) doctors. Our data includes 60 online medical consultations and shows that TCM doctors’ resonance is remarkably higher. This reflected stronger involvement in patients’ speech in combination with other interactional indicators of engagement such as sentence peripheral markers of intersubjectivity (Tantucci, 2021) and strategies of relevance acknowledgement (Tantucci, 2023). The pragmatics of TCM doctors is also characterised by a more directive language geared towards a healthy lifestyle, whereas WM doctors favour etiological assessment, with a predominant use of assertive speech acts.