"Now once again this idea of yours (…) how does it sound when I say that?" - Changing the perspective: how coach's questioning practices elicit self-reflecting processes in clients.

Drawing upon the transformative power of questions, the paper investigates questioning sequences from authentic coaching data to examine the systematic use of a particular succession of formulation and question and its impact on inviting self-reflection processes in the client and eliciting change. The object of investigation in this paper are therefore questioning sequences in which a coach asks a question immediately after a rephrasing or relocating action, prompting the client to respond in an explicit or implicit way. The coach hereby shifts the focus to a hypothetical scenario, prompting the client to change her perspective on the matter and reflect on her own statements, ideas and attitudes from an outside perspective.

[Patient's participation during the pre-anesthesia visit --"if you have no more questions ..."].

Preanesthesia visits are highly complex communicative events with legally demanded participation of the patients. The contribution describes the logical communicative course of this communication type as well as the communicative tasks of the participants. It is shown that physicians in fact offer opportunities for patients' questions but combine them with initiatives for the completion of the interaction; formulations of such offerings are also discouraging patients' questions.

Doctors' questions as displays of understanding.

Based on German data from history-taking in doctor-patient interaction, the paper shows that the three basic syntactic types of questions (questions fronted by a question-word (w-questions), verb-first (V1) questions, and declarative questions) provide different opportunities for displaying understanding in medical interaction. Each syntactic question-format is predominantly used in a different stage of topical sequences in history taking: w-questions presuppose less knowledge and are thus used to open up topical sequences; declarative questions are used to check already achieved understandings and to close topical sequences. Still, the expected scope of answers to yes/no-questions and to declarative questions is less restricted than previously thought.