Persuasion strategies in medical media discourse: a functional and pragmatic analysis

INTRODUCTION. The relevance of the research is due to the need for a comprehensive study of the pragmatic aspect of communication in the media discourse of the modern medicine. The purpose of the study is to conduct a functional and pragmatic analysis of the medical media text, determining the role of subjective modal meanings in this text and identifying the leading modal explicators of persuasion in the text-generating activity of a health professional.
MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material is media text of medical websites collected by continuous sampling from official Internet sources, including web pages of polyclinics and hospitals, scientific and medical diagnostic centers. When processing the resulting corpus of texts, the following methods are used: the comparative method, the method of quantitative data analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatic analysis, computational methods of functional programming in Python.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The functional and pragmatic characteristics of the medical media discourse in terms of modus and presuppositional structures are compiled. The selection of subjective modal explicators, significant for the perlocutionary effect of the utterance, the purpose of which is persuasion, is carried out. Based on the analysis of quantitative data, the leading type of subjective modality in medical media text has been identified. The total number and percentage of explicators of epistemic, deontic, and axiological modality in the selected texts are determined.
CONCLUSION. A pragmatic approach to presuppositions allows us to take a fresh look at the authority of the doctor and paternalism in the medical communication. The comparison of the modal semantics expression in Russian and English texts expands the understanding of the pragmatic, typological and linguistic-cultural side of medical communication, contributing to the understanding of Russian-language discourse as predominantly authoritarian and English-language as predominantly collegial.

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