Code-Switching as a facework strategy within doctor-patient communication in a Galician clinic

Abstract

This work explores code-switching from a sociopragmatic approach as facework in doctor-patient communication in Galicia (Spain), a bilingual speech community. The corpus used in this work was collected through audio-recordings and in-depth interviews in a clinic in this region, where Galician and Castilian are official languages and 95.8% of Galicians claim to understand and 86.9% to speak in a high level both these languages. This research is the first approach to provide answers about why physicians and patients employ code-switching, when there is apparently no linguistic reason (e.g., insufficient language proficiency) to do so. My hypothesis is that speakers accomplish other pragmatic strategies as facework when code-switching, in order to (re)define and (re)construct their identity. In regard to investigate this, I analyze two sequences with the same doctor. In the first one, both doctor and patient employ code-switching from Castilian to Galician as affiliation face and self-facework; while in the second sequence, only the patient employs code-switching from Galician to Castilian as self-facework.