By the Mitigation One Knows the Doctor: Mitigation Strategies by Chinese Doctors in Online Medical Consultation

ABSTRACT

With the increasing popularity and accessibility of online healthcare service and the continuous development of interactive digital communication, online medical consultation is prevalent in contemporary China. As a new genre, online medical consultation deserves in-depth exploration from a non-English discursive perspective in order to better understand the pragmatic features of this genre. This will help to map out the harmonious rapport management between doctors and patients in online medical consultation and describe the localization of the social practice in Chinese cyberspace. As such, this paper attempts to report on the forms and functions of mitigation strategies used by Chinese doctors in online medical consultation. The findings suggest that doctors prefer perlocutionary and locutionary mitigation to illocutionary ones, while mitigations are used to maintain a professional image, construct solidarity and relieve patients’ anxiety. The study demonstrates that the investigation into mitigation in Chinese online medical consultation could not only provide insights into cross-cultural uses of mitigation in the new genre but also provide doctors with appropriate strategies for harmonious rapport management with the patients.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Science Project funded by Ministry of Education under grant [17YJAZH061].