Wir beide und мы с вами (‚wir mit Ihnen‘): Strategien zur Vagheitsreduktion im Gebrauch des Personalpronomens der 1. Person Plural in deutschen und russischen Diagnosemitteilungs- und Therapieplanungsgesprächen

Abstract This paper examines the strategies doctors use to disambiguate the referential scope of the personal pronoun we. In clinical practice, doctors have to manage the different roles in which they can interact with the patients, – as individuals, as representatives of their clinic or their clinical department or as members of the scientific community of medical experts. These different roles also combine with different degrees of agentivity and responsibility. Patients therefore have to decode whether they are included into the we or not. Based on a corpus of more than 90 therapy planning talks recorded at German and Russian oncological clinical departments, our empirical study analyzes which strategies doctors employ to locally clarify the range of we, e. g., by adding a numeral (we two) or a locative phrase (we in this clinic) in order to ensure mutual understanding.