‘aha, ok, alright’ as Phatic Talk: An Analysis on Opening in Multilingual and Multicultural Clinical Consultations

In clinical consultations, doctors and patients try to align their efforts to meet the goal of consultation which is diagnosis and treatment. The general pattern of a clinical consultation, as an activity type, normally includes: opening, history taking, examining, diagnosis, offering treatment, and terminating [1,2]. This study analyses the structure of clinical consultation in a multilingual multicultural setting (MMS) in which the participants are non-native speakers of English. This paper will discuss, in particular, the opening of 15 consultations which reveal a unique feature of the MMS consultations.