Medical interviewing, sequential organization, speech acts, empathy, British National Corpus

The paper offers partial results of a long-term project aimed at the inquiry into the field of medical interviewing. The main goal of the project is to search for communicative strategies of doctors and patients that can convey empathy and trust. Via an interdisciplinary analysis, based on the data excerpted from the most recent edition of the British National Corpus (2007), the author attempts to bring quantitative and qualitative evidence that doctor?patient communication has undergone significant modifications, resulting in social redefinition of the asymmetrical roles of the main protagonists. The present paper draws attention to those communicative practices of doctors and patients that are related to the sequential organization of speech acts in general practice consultation.