Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Interpersonal relationships in medical consultations: Comparing Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish address practices
Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Scandinavian Languages.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2359-4046
University of Turku, Finland.
Helsinki University, Finland.
Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden.
2015 (English)In: Journal of Pragmatics, ISSN 0378-2166, E-ISSN 1879-1387, Vol. 84, p. 121-138Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This article investigates how interpersonal relationships are expressed in medical consultations. In particular, we focus on how modes of address are used in the two national varieties of Swedish: Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish, with the aim to compare the pragmatic routines in the two varieties. Thus the study contributes to the field of variational pragmatics, where national varieties of pluricentric languages are recognised as important research objects.  Address practices are analysed in two comparable corpora of video recordings from Sweden and Finland using both a quantitative and a qualitative CA-inspired method. There are several differences between the data sets: the Sweden Swedish data are characterised by exclusive use of the informal T pronoun (du ‘you’) and an overall higher frequency of direct address compared to the Finland Swedish data. In some medical consultations in the latter Swedish data the formal V pronoun (ni) is used. The qualitative analysis confirms these differences and the tendency is that the Sweden-Swedish medical consultations are more informal than the Finland-Swedish ones, which are characterised by more formality and maintenance of social distance between the interlocutors. The different pragmatic orientations at the micro level of communication can also be related to socio-cultural preferences at the macro level in society – the development towards greater informality and intimate language is more pronounced in Sweden than in Finland. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2015. Vol. 84, p. 121-138
Keywords [en]
Address, Medical consultations, Sweden Swedish, Finland Swedish, Pluricentric languages, Variational pragmatics
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Research subject
Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-118219DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2015.05.006ISI: 000357763900009OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-118219DiVA, id: diva2:821356
Projects
Interaktion och variation i pluricentriska språk IVIP
Funder
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, M12-0137:1Available from: 2015-06-15 Created: 2015-06-15 Last updated: 2022-02-23Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(2335 kB)498 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 2335 kBChecksum SHA-512
9170da050c807fa9dc8a4087705cc3b6372878a9de9db55aa77a9d9f86c0dfce6c99004b2764f1a490657525ab68219ac695bbde9e12b8f7396e28761e83db74
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

Other links

Publisher's full text

Authority records

Norrby, Catrin

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Norrby, Catrin
By organisation
Scandinavian Languages
In the same journal
Journal of Pragmatics
General Language Studies and Linguistics

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 498 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 735 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf