Conversational Analysis of Doctor-Patient Discourse in North Central Nigeria: A Study of Nasarawa State University, Keffi Health Services Unit.

Conversation analysis is an area of sociolinguistics with links to ethno methodology which analyses the structure and norms of conversation in face to face interaction. Conversation analysis is used to describe the basic mechanism in which conversation is based. This is so because in every conversation, each speaker is entitled to ‘turns' where a turn is his or her right obligation to speak. Conversation is therefore organized in such a way that only one speaker at any one time speaks, thereafter, changes of speaker occurs as turns. If speaker change does not occur, what results is a monologue or soliloquy, not a conversation or dialogue. Turn taking therefore becomes an essential component of conversation. This paper is premised an analysing and examining turns in doctor-patient discourse. The paper has as its area of study Nasarawa State University, Keffi school clinic, through the use of an eclectic model to analyse the study data and at the end, findings of the study are discussed