Persuasion in Gerontological Discourse – Obstacles and Strategies in Communication with Geriatric Patients

The article analyses obstacles and strategies in gerontological discourse. The authors provide a brief account of the ways in which various academic fields look at the elderly and propose their own definition of gerontological discourse against this background, defining it as the set of utterances issued by the elderly and to the elderly together with the communicative situation in which they are uttered and the factors that determine their thematic range. Subsequently, basic impediments in communication with senior citizens are presented, followed by a short discussion of non-verbal and multimodal communicative strategies in gerontological discourse. The core of the article is the analysis of verbal persuasive strategies in communication geriatrician – patient. It is presented with reference to the frame of appointment with a geriatrician in the following thematic order: slowness of movement, sight and hearing disorders, repetitiveness and a tendency to depart from the subject of the conversation, pain, non-bona fide communication and the principle of small steps. In this part of the article the authors also put forward a modification of the IADL scale from the perspective of its persuasive value. The last section of the article is devoted to the issue of persuasion in communication with patients suffering from memory and cognitive impairment – discussed in terms of spaced retrieval. The analysis shows that the persuasive value of gerontological discourse is gained through strategies defined at the following levels: communicative situation, text/discourse organization, vocabulary, grammar and syntax, and interactional arrangement.