Authority and instruction in two sixteenth-century medical dialogues

Abstract

Contrasts between generations are in focus in some sixteenth-century medical dialogues. In some dialogues the roles are taken from wisdom literature: the debates are conducted between a wise old man and a foolish youngster. In others the roles of the interactants are strictly professional as an expert teacher discusses with a novice learner. I shall compare two texts written by William Bullein for different audiences. The focus is on the construction of authority and social roles by speech acts and interactional features. I shall discuss first and second person pronouns, address terms, direct and indirect requests, pleas, compliments, thanks and apologies, and pay attention to how the claims are mitigated and how social decorum is provided with politeness.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.