L'interazione medico-badante: nuove frontiere della linguistica medica

This work is a first attempt to investigate the physician-caregiver interaction, in the cases in which a foreigner caregiver accompanies a medical examination the elderly person assisted by her. The corpus of the analysis consists in three dialogues registered in a medical surgery (535 conversational turns), transcribed and annotated by Pra.Ti.D system of annotation. In these conversations the physician has just a slight conversational dominance on all the four levels described by Linell & Luckmann (1991), as the caregivers fight against the doctor’s hidden agenda of medical interviews to fulfill their task in the best way. Contrasting these data with the finding of another dialogue in which the foreign caregiver undergoes the medical examination as a patient, we see how the physician dominance grows, but not so much as in the cases in which doctors and patients share the same mother tongue.