Linguistic Worldview in the Communicative Space of the Healthy and the Sick

Abstract

This article studies the linguistic worldview of healthy and sick people and its reflection in various spheres of communication. Examples of verbalization of important components of human health and disease are analysed here. For materials, the authors turned to the results of surveys, mass media texts, and TV projects. Based on the data studied, the following conditions for the development of healthy people’s linguistic worldview were singled out: positive thinking; linguistic ecological monitoring of language use and appropriate regulations in the state linguistic policy; strengthening the communicative component in the educational programmes in schools and universities. For the sick, these conditions are: manipulating a person’s communicative consciousness by means of language-game in TV projects, using negatively coloured vocabulary/information in mass media texts, and bastardizing the language. The authors established that the linguistic worldview of a healthy/sick person directly depends on his or her linguistic consciousness, which is formed under the influence of several factors, including the language, which plays a major role in creating cognitive and verbal structures of social consciousness. Further, it is noted that any society is prone to being divided into the healthy and the sick by the criterion of otherness, highlighting significant differences in their communicative behaviour and language use, which is reflected in the linguistic worldview that can be presented in the form of a semantic field with a nuclear and a peripheral zone. These zones represent a healthy (nucleus) and a sick (periphery) society. At the verbal level, various spheres of a healthy/sick person’s life, perceived positively or negatively, are mirrored in the person’s worldview. In this respect, a healthy society is thought of as more positive and ecological in terms of communication, while a sick society is seen as more negative and non-ecological. To prevent risks of failed communication, it is essential to create conditions for ecological communicative interaction.