ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on corpus-based analyses of spoken healthcare discourse, and prioritizes patient–provider discourse, since this is, historically, the most commonly researched area of healthcare discourse outside of corpus-based studies and is still considered an important research domain. It also focuses on the analyses of nurse–patient interactions that incorporate corpus-linguistic methods for analyzing both linguistic features and larger discourse units. The 2000s saw a blossoming of corpus-based research on healthcare discourse, with most studies continuing the tradition of top-down analysis of particular linguistic features within concordancing programs, allowing for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. To further explain some of the differences in findings across groups, and to understand the discourse of the phases in more detail, it is helpful to examine the linguistic features common to each phase. For this part of analysis, the interactions were split not only by phase but also by speaker in order to identify differences in the use of features by two nurse groups.
