A Study on the Same-Turn Self-Repair in Chinese Doctor-Patient Interaction

Based on the data from real-life Chinese medical interactions, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the choices of different repair strategies in the same-turn self-repair and makes comparison between doctors and patients in employing those strategies, with an interpretation from the perspective of epistemics.Altogether seven types of repair strategies are found in the data, and there are both doctor-patient similarities and differences in the occurrence and reasons for employing those strategies.Both doctors and patients employ different repair strategies to express their epistemic stance based on their understandings of the epistemic status of themselves and of their interlocutors.