Vostrova S. Cognitive and Pragmatic Peculiarities of Modern English HIV/ AIDS Medical Discourse

The thesis highlights cognitive and pragmatic peculiarities of modern English HIV/ AIDS medical discourse in its written form. The analysis of medical discourse done from the communicative perspective made it possible to distinguish two subtypes of medical discourse (professional and professional-lay) as well as the addresser's main communicative strategies and tactics. The analysis of nominal, adjectival and verbal lexical nominations done from cognitive perspective made it possible to determine the conceptual structure of English medical discourse which comprises two conceptual situations THE COURSE OF DISEASE and TREATMENT OF DISEASE. These conceptual situations are modeled as frame structures DISEASE and TREATMENT which combine features of the Thing, Action and Possession frames. Besides they are structured by the conceptual metaphors THE COURSE OF DISEASE IS WAR and TREATING ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR. The lexical-semantic peculiarities of conceptual situations representation in professional and professional-lay medical discourse are analyzed.