Authors’ names:
Anastasiya A. Golubykh, Olga N. Isaeva – Samara National Research University, Samara, Russia
Abstract:
The paper examines the concept “medical law,” focusing on the specificity of its verbalizations and functions in mass-media publications of the website The Patients Association, which provides assistance to residents of the United Kingdom supporting their rights and interests in the health and social care issues, and the website Doctors Defense Service, which provides comprehensive legal services to doctors. Today, in the context of globalization and medicalization of society, these information resources serve as an actual means of transmitting the most important information about modern problems of medical law, appealing to such vital values as life and health of the population. The aim of the paper is to identify and analyze the peculiarities of linguistic representations of the concept “medical law” in the English mass-media discourse, emphasizing the importance of this concept as a source of medical law terminology. As its primary methods, the study employs functional-pragmatic analysis, discourse analysis, as well as conceptual, linguistic, and semantic analysis. The relevance of the research is determined by the importance of the issue of legal protection for both the doctor and the patient, which is reflected in a socially significant life context and constitutes an integral axiological component of the modern worldview. The novelty of research lies in the fact that the concept under study is analyzed for the first time in terms of the functional potential of its representative linguistic markers, which interact within the texts of the mass media discourse under study. The concept is also described as a specific vector reflecting the legal framework accompanying medical activities, namely: the protection of the rights of the patient and the healthcare worker. The study points out that the concept “medical law” is one of the essential components of the conceptual sphere “medicine.” It is not a static concept and, therefore, it is regularly enriched with new linguistic units and new meanings alongside pre-existing ones. This is clearly expressed in the ability of the mass-media discourse to reflect language changes in society and to contribute to the linguistic picture of the world. The identified discursive markers of the concept “medical law,” found in the texts published on The Patients Association and Doctors Defense Service websites, define the key directions in matters of the legal framework accompanying medical activities.
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2025-71-3-108-123 |
| Downloads | 1041 |
| Key words | concept “medical law”; functional characteristics; mass-media discourse; conceptual framework “medicine”; legal support; medical activity |