The Bosnian Discourse Marker PA in Answer Sequences to WH-Questions in Doctor-Patient Interaction: A Conversation Analysis Perspective

The study examines the function of the turn-initial Bosnian discourse marker PA in patients’ responses to doctors’ wh-questions during the history-taking phase. In addition to being one of the least researched discourse markers in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, PA has primarly been analyzed through written sources. This paper, however, draws on naturally occurring data, opening new possibilities for analyzing its use accross different sequential environments within the institutional setting of medical interactions. Using the framework of Conversation Analysis, and particulary the concepts of progressivity and type-conformity (Schegloff 2007), I demonstrate that PA facilitates a subjective yet relevant response to wh-questions about patients’ symptoms. It is not only reactive, but also plays a role in structuring sequences and exhibits a forward-looking function. Moreover, its placement before type-conforming answers signals an interactional phenomenon related to patients’ epistemic self-positioning of patients during the history-taking phase. This analysis is based on a corpus consisting of 20 audio-recorded conversations between Bosnian hospital physicians and their patients.