Linguopragmatic Features of the Medical Tourism Internet Discourse

Abstract

The article deals with the linguopragmatic features of medical tourism discourse as a type of tourism discourse. Medical tourism has a long history and today represents one of the most demanded segments of tourism market practically in any country. The growing needs of the developed globalized society in getting comprehensive tourist services, including treatment / health improvement / rest, gave rise to differentiated types of medical tourism: medical tourism in its pure form, health tourism, combined medical tourism. The author's attention is focused on the examination of linguistic features of medical tourism abroad. In view of the fact that the access to foreign clinics is most easily ensured through intermediary companies, the potential tourists-patients resort to information resources on the Internet. Tourism Internet discourse is the most effective channel of communication, the involvement of a wide range of tourists in the global culture, advertisement and promotion of tourism product, which also includes medical tourist services. The article considers websites devoted to medical discourse in Germany and oriented not only to German-speaking but also Russianspeaking audience. The discourse description of websites is made in accordance with discourse making features used in sociolinguistics: 1) discourse participants; 2) communication circumstances/conditions (chronotope and communication environment); 3) communication goal; 4) means of communication; 5) topic. The paper presents the analysis of discursive features of medical tourism websites, language features, implementing the communicative program of the website. The analyzed material illustrates that the hypertext is aimed at maximum trust, ease of communication, naturalness, uniqueness and quality of intermediary and / or medical service openness. The research has shown that the discursive space of medical tourism is fully consistent with the discursive features of tourism as a whole.

Keywords

• tourism discourse
• medical tourism
• communicative tonality
• linguistic means
• discourse space