| Popis: |
Bad news is a problem for both news bearers and news recipients, especially in situations where apprehensions run high given that it may run counter to people’s in situ social and psychological needs (Maynard 2003). The object of this paper was to examine the discursive strategies used by diseased individuals and their caregivers to deliver and manage their bad news. In pursing the above objective, transcripts of narratives collected from diseased individuals and their caregivers were subjected to empirical inspection with the view to determining the communicative strategies they employed to deal with their special situation. The study was done within the framework of language and liberty (Obeng 2018, 2020) and the results showed that disease and “powerful” actors intrude on diseased individuals and care-givers’ negative liberty (by encroaching on their fundamental freedoms) and positive liberty (by preventing them from participating in their family and communal lives). Common linguistic strategies used in talking about disease and in seeking and protecting participants liberty include: silence, hesitations, reduplication, adjectives of quality, adverbs and intensifiers, verbs denoting physical sensation, and factive formulae (for evidentiality and credence). Discourse-pragmatic strategies for delivering bad news and for seeking liberty include the speech acts of complaining, blaming and assuring. Other strategies include avoidance, inferencing and polyvocality. It is concluded that to protect diseased individuals’ liberty from and liberty to, there is the need to put in place rights that protect these freedoms and empower diseased individuals to participate in their family and communal lives. Also, society must understand the communicational mores surrounding bad news delivery and management and be “educated” about the intertwining nature of language and care-giving. |
