Popularization of Medical Knowledge in German Journal Discourse in Perspective of Language Code

Abstract

A study was conducted on the language code used in medical popular science texts in German journal discourse. Interviews, brief news texts, and articles on medical topics are used as empirical material. It is shown that the arsenal of modern German language resources is aimed at implementing communicative-pragmatic functions of popular science discourse texts as a whole. It is noted that the leading functions among them are informing, influencing, and persuading the target audience. It is established that verbal means of different linguistic levels, as well as a number of stylistic devices (inversion, parceling, allusion, metaphor, metonymy, personification), not only convey medical knowledge to wide segments of the population but also transmit information about the national-cultural specifics of Germany and its achievements in medicine, taking into account the age characteristics of the addressees, also performing an educational function and seeking to achieve emotional involvement of the reader in complex content. The relevance of the study is due to the growing interest of non-professional participants in media-medical communication in the processes of self-diagnosis and self-treatment, which require mastering various medical knowledge. The novelty of the research lies in determining the pragmatic potential of structural-compositional features, including clickable headlines, and linguistic means, thanks to which a special media-medical picture of the world is formed.