Semiotics of Medical Discourse

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Abstract

Medical discourse as an institutional discourse is considered simultaneously in several aspects: genre palette; discourse participants and their communicative strategies and speech behaviour; forms of communication between patient and doctor; methods and material for transmitting medical information; linguistic means of monocode, polycode and multimodal text of medical discourse; visual means of polycode and multimodal tests; functions implemented by texts of different types. The very identification of the boundaries of medical discourse will remain relevant. The objects of analysis are Russian-language memes, demotivators, which we understand as a type of Internet memes, caricatures on a medical topic, printed advertisements for medical drugs, services and events, and medical posters. The subject of the study are iconic signs, index signs and symbols of medicine. The novelty of the proposed study is the appeal to these elements of a polycode text as a system of signs that are subject to decoding to recognize the author’s intention; their use is not obligatory, while their quality of generalization allows expressing a larger volume of meanings, and the recipient of the text relies on them to identify the text as belonging to medical discourse. The research material are polycode (with verbal and iconic series) texts with a total volume of 500 examples obtained by continuous sampling from the Internet. The study showed that the semiotic system should be recognized as an important element of polycode texts of medical discourse, since each of the three types of signs is noted in the five genres under consideration and performs summarizing, attractive, organizing, replacing and comic functions in the text. As an object of decoding in polycode texts on medical topics, we examined individual examples of the use of precedent phenomena. The algorithm for analyzing the semiotic system of medical discourse can be used to analyze the semiotic system of other types of institutional discourse.

About the authors

Yulia N. Ebzeeva

RUDN University

Email: ebzeeva-yun@pfur.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0043-7590
SPIN-code: 3316-4356
Scopus Author ID: 57194398624
ResearcherId: Q-72762016

Ds.Сs. (Sociology), Associate Professor, the First Vice-Rector - ViceRector for Education, Head of the Foreign Languages Department, Faculty of Philology

6, Miklukho-Maklaya str., Moscow, Russian Federation, 117198

Natalia M. Dugalich

RUDN University

Author for correspondence.
Email: dugalich-nm@pfur.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1863-2754
SPIN-code: 2458-7744
Scopus Author ID: 57194526936
ResearcherId: K-8404-2017

PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Head of the Foreign Languages Department, of Medicine, Associate Professor of the Foreign Languages Department, Faculty of Philology

6, Miklukho-Maklaya str., Moscow, Russian Federation, 117198

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Supplementary files

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1. Fig. 1. Demotivators of medical discourse

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2. Fig. 2. Memes of medical discourse

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3. Fig. 3. Advertising of medical discourse

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4. Fig. 4. Medical posters

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5. Fig. 5. Caricatures of medical discourse

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Copyright (c) 2024 Ebzeeva Y.N., Dugalich N.M.

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