Linguistic pecularities of the concept “pandemic” in the english-language newspaper discourse (based on medical articles)

Abstract

This article examines the lexical means of verbal representation of the concept Pandemic on the basis of English-language newspaper medical articles. The relevance of the article lies in the subject itself the pandemic, which appeared in late 2019 and early 2020 and continues to these days. This phenomenon is of interest for linguistic research, since important social phenomena are always reflected in the language and speech of both an individual country and the whole of humanity. The coronavirus pandemic has become just such a phenomenon. The purpose of our work is to establish verbalization units of the concept Pandemic in English-language newspaper articles on coronavirus topics that are devoted to medicine. To achieve this goal, the following research methods were used in our study: collection and analysis of the receiving information, the method of definitional analysis, the method of continuous sampling, descriptive method, statistical method, and also elements of conceptual analysis. In the theoretical part of our article, we consider the most important terms that are important for further understanding of the content: the newspaper kind of journalistic discourse and the concept. In the practical part, the research itself is presented: highlighting the concept of Pandemic, giving definitions of the meaning of this concept, selecting and describing frames of the concept of Pandemic from newspaper articles, conducting statistical analysis and summarizing the results of the research done. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that linguistic works on the studied aspect of the concept Pandemic have not been previously presented in scientific publications. The practical significance of this article lies in the fact that its materials and conclusions can be used in the further study of the verbalization of the concept Pandemic in other spheres of public life. The article is an attempt to describe the means of linguistic verbalization of the concept under study.