Mitigation in the Iraqi medical discourse

Abstract EN

In the setting of medical discourse, doctors tend to mitigate the force of their medical conversations by means of hedging devices in order to reduce the risk of opposition and minimize the force threatening acts that are involved in the making of conversations.

This study explores the phenomenon of hedging in the medical discourse from gender- social relationship.

To this end, conversations of doctors-patients in Iraqi Arabic were recorded and analyzed in terms of the frequency of occurrence and distribution of the various strategies and the linguistic devices associated with each strategy which performs a hedging function in the different structural units of the conversations.

In addition, the study aims at highlighting how doctors in their conversations with patients shy away from committing to tell the truth by using certain strategies and finding out how the use of the hedging devices is linked to gender.

The participants include 6 male doctors and 6 female doctors in two hospitals(Al-Mawani Teaching Hospital and Al-jomhouri Hospital) in Basra.

The theoretical framework chosen is Hyland's (2004) model.

The findings of the study show that female doctors use more hedging devices than male doctors and female patients talk and ask more than male patients do.

Doctors, both males and females, are essentially caught between being truthful and hurtful or being kind and false.

This suggests that the conversations in the field of medical discourse, as a whole, involve more protection of the speaker's face than other discourse contexts.