The role of tag questions in medical encounters

Abstract

The discourse of medical encounters is deemed to be an excellent example of both institutional talk and discourse of power. Asking questions is probably the most prominent characteristic of doctor- patient interaction and this paper deals with tag questions as one of the question types that can be found in almost every medical encounter. We will explore tag questions by reviewing current research results in the field of medical discourse and by comparing and discussing examples from transcribed medical encounters in English and Serbian. It will be discussed how often tag questions are used in both corpora, whether doctors and patients use them in the same way and what role these questions have in a medical encounter. Finally, having in mind that getting to ask any question in institutional talk requires a certain amount of power, we will also try to determine if using tag questions affects doctor and patient?s positions in a medical encounter.