Giving directives in a medical laboratory in Hong Kong

A directive refers to an act to get someone to do something. While there have been a considerable number of studies devoted to the expression and frequency of directives, only a few (e.g. Vine 2004) focus on directives in workplace settings. Literature employing Cantonese data is scarce. This paper attempts to fill the gap by examining directives in a medical laboratory in Hong Kong.This paper constitutes part of an on-going study of daily interaction between a supervisor and his subordinates in the laboratory and focuses on directives issued from/to a supervisor to/from his subordinates in the laboratory. Whereas a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is employed in the study, this paper reports and discusses findings and observations drawn from the quantitative approach. The research data for the paper consists of about 3.5 hours of audio-recorded interaction between the supervisor and his subordinates (the whole database contains over 20 hours). The language of interaction is Cantonese, of which all participants are native speakers.The findings show that over 90% of the directives identified in the focus data are delivered explicitly and more than 80% of the explicit directives are in imperatives. No significant discrepancies in the upward and downward directives have been observed. Such findings are found quite different from those reported in Vine (2004). Given that our data take place in a society of high power distance, the results appear to be interesting. We will explore the reasons behind the differences in a later section of the paper. (250 words)