Medicalization in the modern british and american english: structural and narrative analysis

Abstract

Introduction: The article focuses on the mechanisms of medicalization, i.e., the description of social phenomena, human qualities or types of behavior in terms of biomedical conditions in the modern British and American English. The aim of the research is to provide a structural typology of “medicalized” lexical units in the modern British and American English, and to analyze the author’s pragmatic intentions and communicative strategies in each particular case. Materials and methods: The material of the research is the corpus of articles (2002-2017) from The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Forbes and The New York Times. The “medicalized” lexical units were selected by automatic search and sampling, and considered by means of structural, narrative, contextual and component analysis methods. Review: It has been found that medicalization in the British and American mass media discourse is observed at four linguistic levels: (1) at the level of morphemes (affixation); (2) at the level of lexemes; (3) at the level of collocations; and (4) at the level of sentences. Affixation is one of the most productive tools of medicalization which leads to the formation of medical neologisms. The lexical manifestations of medicalization implement the following communicative strategies and pragmatic intentions: skepticism expression; attracting the readers’ attention; revealing and denouncing the addictive phenomena and processes of the present-day world. The affixation way of neologization provides the newly created words with a vivid stylistic shade. The use of “medicalized” headlines enables the authors to capture the readers’ attention. Conclusions: Medicalization is a complex process involving the spreading influence of medical terminology into the communicative environment of “non-medical” areas of human life, which requires further linguistic study. Medicalization of virtually all spheres of society is an essential driving force in the formation of the linguistic world-image of the modern man, and the research of this tendency allows us to reveal the underlying processes of human thinking. By means of medicalization, authors attract the readers’ attention, focus on the burning societal problems, aiming to “diagnose” and “treat” these issues.