Torres Peter Joseph, Henry Stephen Gresham, Ramanathan Vaidehi
Department of Linguistics, University of California Davis, CA, USA.
Division of General Medicine, Geriatrics, and Bioethics, University of California Davis, Sacramento, CA, USA.
Discourse Stud. 2020 Apr;22(2):174-204. doi: 10.1177/1461445619893796. Epub 2019 Dec 19.
In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor-patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic resources when describing chronic pain, narrating symptoms, and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions.
近年来，美国的阿片类药物危机引发了关于慢性疼痛治疗中医患互动的大量讨论，但对于患者言语的发声方面却几乎没有给予关注。这项探索性社会语言学研究旨在通过运用韵律话语分析来检查两种不同医疗互动中对话者使用的特定情境语言特征，以填补这一知识空白。我们发现，患者在描述慢性疼痛、叙述症状和请求使用阿片类药物时，会将低音调和嘎吱声作为语言资源。这两种特征的情境性使用让我们了解到患者根据当前的阿片类药物危机来构建诸如慢性疼痛等棘手问题的语言方式。这项研究扩展了话语分析领域内语音分析的广度，有助于阐明围绕下声道在表达情感中的言外作用的讨论。
