Reviews by patients of Novosibirsk and London maternity hospitals (on the material of flamp.ru and nhs.uk)

The article is written in the framework of discourse linguistics. The object of analysis is naive medical discourse which is created by non-specialists in medicine, first of all, for non-specialists, but also for medical institutions representatives. The analysis of this discourse is given in the article. This analysis is carried out according to the scheme elaborated by V.I. Karasik. The article deals with language means of evaluation expression which are used in the reviews of maternity hospitals of Novosibirsk and London left on two websites - flamp.ru and nhs.uk. The novelty of the research is determined, firstly, by the novelty of the source of material and, secondly, by the comparative aspect of the work. Research in discourse linguistics, connected with medical discourse in particular, works on the general evaluation theory and its ethno-cultural specifics and the study of evaluation in various types of discourse serve as the methodological basis of the present research. For the analysis of the empirical material the classification by the reason of evaluation made by N.D. Arutyunova was used. However, in the present paper the types of evaluation described in Arutyunova's classification are used as applied to any language unit, not only evaluative predicates. On the basis of 40 reviews analysis (20 microtexts in Russian and 20 microtexts in English), a conclusion about the fundamental similarity in evaluation representation in Russian and English reviews was made. Most often maternity hospitals are evaluated from the point of view of ethics in staff's actions; thus, for parturient women the degree of kindness, politeness of the staff, their willingness to help play an important role. Also, rather often maternity hospitals are evaluated from the point of view of complying with norms and meeting standards, and one can also see general evaluation of a maternity hospital in many of the reviews. The most widely spread means of evaluation expression are words with axiological meaning belonging to different parts of speech (adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs), although some other lexical and phraseological, morphological and syntactic means are also used. Moreover, in the reviews of London maternity hospitals such means are more diverse and more frequent. In both Russian and English reviews words and expressions with inherent and adherent evaluation are used. The possibility of making a comparative analysis of language means of evaluation representation in various discourses and on the material of other languages is considered as a promising direction of further research.

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