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Tag questions have traditionally been discussed as linguistic strategies used by nonassertive speakers. This article reports the findings of a qualitative study investigating the use of modal and affective tag questions by 3 Australian female general practitioners. Analysis of 29 audiotaped consultations revealed that tag questions were used as both control and involvement strategies. They were found to be employed by doctors for their potential to elicit information from patients, to summarize and confirm information, and to express empathy and provide positive feedback. The implications of these findings are discussed in the light of general patterns of doctor-patient communication as well as more efficient clinical interaction.

The theoretical framework of this paper is based on the literature on language and ideology as well as language and gender, focussing on the reflection of gender ideologies in medical texts. Three medical texts were analysed with regard to the linguistic representation of women. While one text is taken from a gynaecological textbook, the other two texts are representative of popular medical books. The main objective of the study was to determine how ideologies of gender are reflected in the authors’ choice of lexis, and the syntactic relations in the texts. The findings indicated that the use of language mirrors the ideological orientation of the authors, and that medical discourse is characterised to a large degree by sexist language.

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