Presentation of "health" in the media

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PRESENTATION OF HEALTH IN THE MEDIA

Sivaieva O.S.,

Teacher at the Department of Germanic Philology Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University

HEALTH being defined as `the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit' goes far beyond the field of biology and it is the subject of numerous multidisciplinary studies. HEALTH is also related to social medical care and during the world spread pandemic HEALTH has acquired specific significance as a great number of people faced some health problems because of Covid. The article is devoted to the study of HEALTH presentation in the media, in The Guardian articles in particular. The first stage of the research concentrated on the associative experiment with the stimulus word HEALTH. Students of different majors (medicine, technology and linguistics) were asked to share their associations with HEALTH. The most frequent associations constituted the basics for the second stage of the research which is based on the corpus analysis in order to unveil what associative words with HEALTH are presented in media texts. Sketch Engine has been used to process the corpus of The Guardian articles. Associative words with HEALTH have different frequency presentation in the associative experiment and in the media texts. Thus, the word vaccination has the leading position in the associative experiment with the stimulus word HEALTH, whereas according to corpus analysis of The Guardian articles, the most frequently used word is Covid. The words that are commonly frequent in the media discourse are pandemic, hospital, patient, virus, though these words are not at the top of the HEALTH association word list, and on the contrary, mask, doctor and Covid test which are favoured by students are less frequently used in the media texts. Due to different frequency we concentrated on the more detailed analysis of three lemmas - DOCTOR, PANDEMIC and QUARANTINE - in the media texts and considered their semantic prosody in the media context which demonstrated clearly positive presentation of the first lemma and negative of the two latter. As we investigated presentation of HEALTH in the broadsheet The Guardian, the further perspective is a study of the same associative words with HEALTH in tabloids which will include comparative analysis of the results gained in two studies.

Key words: HEALTH, association, corpus analysis, media, The Guardian.

ПРЕЗЕНТАЦІЯ HEALTH У МЕДІЙНИХ ТЕКСТАХ

Згідно словникового визначення, HEALTH - це «стан здорового тіла, розуму чи духу», що виходить далеко за межі біологічного значення і це є предметом численних міждисциплінарних досліджень. HEALTH також пов'язано з системою охорони здоров'я і тому, під час світової пандемії HEALTH набуло особливого значення, оскільки велика кількість людей зіткнулась з певними проблемами зі здоров'ям в результаті появи ковіду. Статтю присвячено аналізу презентації HEALTH у медійних текстах, зокрема у статтях The Guardian. На першому етапі дослідження було проведено асоціативний експеримент зі словом-стимулом HEALTH. Студенти різних спеціальностей (медичної, технологічної та лінгвістичної) були опитані стосовно їхніх асоціацій з HEALTH. Найчастотніші асоціації стали основою для проведення другого етапу дослідження, яке базувалося на корпусному аналізі асоціативних слів з HEALTH у медіа текстах. Для обробки отриманих даних по корпусу статей The Guardian було використано програму Sketch Engine. Слова-асоціації з HEALTH мають різну частотність представлення в асоціативному експерименті та в медійних текстах. Так, за результатами асоціативного експерименту зі словом-стимулом HEALTH лідируючу позицію займає слово vaccination, тоді як згідно корпусного аналізу статей The Guardian найбільш вживаним словом є Covid. Слова, які часто зустрічаються в медіа дискурсі: pandemic, hospital, patient, virus, хоча ці слова не займають вищі сходинки серед слів-асоціацій з HEALTH, і навпаки такі слова як mask, doctor and Covid test, яким надають перевагу студенти, рідше вживаються у медіа текстах. Через різну частотність вживання слів-асоціацій з HEALTH ми зосередились на більш детальному аналізі трьох лем, а саме: DOCTOR, PANDEMIC і QUARANTINE у медіа текстах та дослідили їх семантичну просодію у медіа контексті, що продемонструвало чітке позитивне значення першої леми та негативне двох останніх. Оскільки ми досліджували представлення HEALTH у газеті The Guardian, подальшою перспективою є вивчення та аналіз тих самих слів-асоціацій з HEALTH в таблоїдах, що включатиме порівняльний аналіз результатів обох досліджень.

Ключові слова: HEALTH, асоціація, корпусний аналіз, ЗМІ, The Guardian.

stimulus word health associations media texts

Introduction. All modem concepts of HEALTH recognize it as more than the absence of disease, implying a maximum capacity of the individual for self-realization and self-fulfillment. This should balance the human's inner forces and possibilities with the feeling of pleasure or dissatisfaction the human being can get, their interaction with the world around them, adjusting to living and / or working conditions [1]. Social medicine and public health approach to health advocate that we should not only observe the health of individuals, but also the health of groups and communities, as a result of the interaction of individuals with the social environment. So, the aim of the article is to unveil how HEALTH is seen by young students and which of their associations about HEALTH are reflected in the media texts.

Literature overview. The World Health Organisation's (WHO) definition of health does not fit the current societal viewpoints anymore [2]. The WHO's definition of health is formulated as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity [3]. Due to the word `complete' in this definition, many people would not be considered healthy, because of their chronic illnesses or disabilities [2, 3]. For them, complete wellbeing would be utopian and unfeasible [4]. This is no longer uniformly accepted. Perspectives on people with physical disabilities are changing; they are no longer seen as `unhealthy'. On the other hand, the focus has shifted to the fact that people, when they get a chronic illness or disability, do need to adapt to their new situation; being able to do this is part of the recently developed paradigm of `positive health' [5].

HEALTH is defined as the general condition of your body [6], and may be regarded as totally biological notion with the opposition HEALTH-DESEASE, in other words POSITIVE-NEGATIVE, but actually HEALTH goes far beyond the field of biology and it is the subject of a great number of studies and the subject of linguistic research in particular. During the pandemic period HEALTH has become of special interest for almost everybody.

The Associative experiment allows to reveal students' perception of HEALTH during the pandemic times. The method of associative experiment was first used by Francis Galton [7, pp. 149-162] in 1879 in order to research the «association of ideas» in his experiments. The German physiologist and philosopher W. Wundt [8, p. 23] used associative experiment method to define the verbal association speed in 1892. Recent studies which are based on free associative experiments are rather productive in many interdisciplinary fields. For an experiment only one- word stimulus is usually chosen and in order to get free word associations respondents are supposed to give answers with first words that appear in the minds [9, p. 21]. The type of word which is used as a stimulus word can be a noun, verb, adjective, or numeral. In this regard, M. Bahar and M. Hansell [10, p. 349] explain that in a free word association experiment, the most important thing is the right explanations of response words to each stimulus word. An associative experiment is one of the methods which make it possible to study linguistic thought activity being behind linguistic units, to look at formation of reality image in it, the view of world picture in human linguistic memory and thinking activity mechanism through practical experiments.

While the methodology of the experiment has been well established, the data processing remains a disputable issue. The debatable question concerns the principles of data processing. As far back as Aristotle's classification, associations were grouped according to similarity, contrast or sequence. Traditionally the relations are subdivided into associations of contiguity in space and time, thematic attribution, similarity or contrast. Nowadays, linear typology has been recognized insufficient: it should include functional characteristics as well. Following the concept of semantic fields worked out by Trier and Porzig [11], it is assumed that the associative field comprises paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of response. The effective approach to data processing combines different ways to produce the most appropriate tool for the research. A successfully working typology of results takes into consideration the relations set between the word-stimulus and response, as well as the relations between the elements in the semantic field, created by the whole set of response. Organized around the word-stimulus, the elements of the field belong to particular themes. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations in the field are determined by cultural and language competence of respondents [12].

Cultural peculiarities about HEALTH may be learned by respondents from the media as the mass media discourse is one of main information sources for human beings as it reflects events taking place at a certain period of time and it outlines main topics which can be of particular interest to society [13].

Media texts in its turn can be studied with the help of corpus analysis. Corpus is a `body' of language, or more precisely, a very large collection of naturally occurring language, stored as computer files. T. McEnery and A. Hardie in 2011 in their work “Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice” allege that corpus linguistics study language carrying explanation or description, also underlying that Corpus Linguistics is a quantitative methodology, which means that corpus linguistics mostly deals with numbers reflecting frequencies of words and phrases in corpora [14]. However, nowadays Corpus Linguistics is seen not only as a methodology but as a theory of language as well, and very often it combines both. According to T. McEnery and A. Wilson [15, p. 1] it was conceived as nothing but a methodology, created from a set of theoretical principles about language, although it could be argued that more recently it has been used to advance theories about language use [16]. W. Teubert [17, p. 4] states that Corpus Linguistics is not a method but an insistence on working only with real language data taken from the discourse in a principled way and compiled into a corpus, and E. Tognini-Bonelli [18, p. 1], supporting the mentioned above idea, argues that Corpus Linguistics has gone well beyond [its] methodological role and has become an independent field of linguistics.

Media and HEALTH. The research consists of two stages: the first includes the Associative experiment with the stimulus word HEALTH held among 355 students, which revealed their associations connected with health and enabled to outline the semantic field of HEALTH, while the second stage presupposes a corpus analysis of media texts concentrating on the text presentations of the lexemes we got during the associative experiment.

The corpus was created with the help of Sketch Engine program. The corpus presents the data received from the newspaper texts taken from the broadsheet The Guardian. The focus of attention is the collocations with the lexemes from the associative experiment.

We conducted a free associative experiment using the method of individual questioning of 355 testees aged from 16 to 22 years. They were not limited in time or number of answers. As a result of their responses, we received reactions that comprise the associative fields of the stimulus word HEALTH.

According to the experimental data obtained, the associative field of the word HEALTH is presented as following (see Diagram 1):

All these verbal manifestations underwent classification according to their semantic and functional meaning, relations of similarity and contiguity set up with the stimulus. Thus, we distinguish three thematic classes, which are determined by visual (Health-care), implicational (Illness), and functional (Activity) characteristics of the word under study. All the associations are represented by lexical units. Quantitatively, the groups are represented by 42 % of ILLNESS, 33 % of HEALTH-CARE, and 25 % of ACTIVITY (see Figure 1).

The class HEALTH-CARE is constituted by 4 lexical units. The visual class comprises the names of representatives and the attributes of the health care facilities (doctor, patient, hospital, mask), which are in partitive relations with the word-stimulus.

The word DOCTOR, for example, in general has a positive implication, as it is defined in the dictionary as a physician; a member of the medical profession; one who is trained and licensed to heal the sick [19].

Fig. 1. Thematic classes of associations with HEALTH

However, collocations with the lemma DOCTOR can have negative, positive and neutral semantic prosody depending on the contextual meaning of the whole passage. The criterion to define the studied collocations with DOCTOR as positive, negative or neutral is totally based on the positiveness / negativeness of the idea presented in the passage taking into consideration the verbs that describe actions either connected or triggering other positive or negative consequences or results as well as other phrases in the passage that can be identified as positive or negative. Thus, for example, in the given passage The UK will pay an economic price for failing to consider long Covid when lifting restrictions and making recommendations on vaccinations for children, a doctor has warned (The Guardian), the verb warn together with the phrase “making recommendations” a viable solution create a positive picture of a doctor as a specialist, expert, so the given collocation is marked as a positive one.

The data given by the Sketch Engine present various information, showing similarities and differences between certain collocations found in the media discourse (see Figure 2).

The discourse collocations analysis of DOCTOR proves that this collocation has positive coloring in the articles.

The implicative class ILLNESS is constituted by 5 lexical units. Health is associated with its direct opposites, such as: Covid-19, pandemic, virus, Delta and Omicron. Thus, the categorial group is based on formal dissimilarity with the stimulus. The specifying group includes proper names, which allude to typical illnesses and conditions of the modern humanity.

Fig. 2. The n-gram of collocations with DOCTOR

PANDEMIC as an epidemic that is geographically widespread occurring throughout a region or even throughout the world has a strong negative connotation. Negative pictures in the passages where through verbs or phrases unfavourable situations are shaped collocations `PANDEMIC + noun' are considered to have a negative mode, e.g., Almost 15,000 ghost flights left the UK between the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and September 2021, the Guardian revealed in February (The Guardian). The analysis of the given passage enables to state the collocation “the Covid-19 pandemic” as the one with negative semantic prosody being reinforced with the noun ghost also having negative semantic prosody, and all together depicting the consequences of the epidemic (see Figure 3).

The functional class Activity is composed by 3 nouns that are in synonymic (vaccination) and antonymic relations (Covid-Test, Quarantine) with the word-stimulus.

QUARANTINE is defined as:

- a sanitary measure to prevent the spread of a contagious plague by isolating those believed to be infected;

- a certain place for isolating persons suspected of suffering from a contagious disease;

Fig. 3. The n-gram of collocations with PANDEMIC

Fig. 5. The most frequently used words with HEALTH in The Guardian and in the experiment

- a certain period of time during which a person is isolated to determine whether they've been infected with a contagious disease [20].

The nouns requirement, facility express negative prosody in the context. Such collocations create an image of restrictions affecting people's activities and relationships. In addition, people do not want to be forced to get isolated, or to wear masks urging different political forces to maneuver between two camps of quarantine supporters or opponents, e.g. Health Minister, Yvette D'Ath, announced the suspension, saying the mounting number of health workers needing to quarantine or isolate was taking its toll (The Guardian). Thus, collocations with QUARANTINE possessing negative semantic prosody cannot but create gloomy, unfavorable, sometimes pessimistic depiction of what is happening right now in the world, still presenting actions both governments and people take in order to cope with the situations, which the following n-gram exemplifies (see Figure 4).

During the corpus analysis we have concentrated mostly on three associative words received from the associative experiment - DOCTOR, PANDEMIC and QUARANTINE - as most representative in the media texts (see Figure 5).

Conclusion. In the focus of the research there are the lexemes pandemic, vaccination, doctor, Covid test, mask, hospital, patient, virus elicited from a free associative experiment with the stimulus word HEALTH. The media attribute particular qualities and functions to HEALTH, which they learned about indirectly. According to corpus analysis of The Guardian articles, the most frequently used word is VACCINATION. The words that are commonly frequent in the media discourse are Covid-19, pandemic, hospital, patient, virus. In conclusion, it should be admitted that, the method of the associative experiment, rather rarely used nowadays, is an efficient method to unveil latent information of cultural and social phenomena, HEALTH in our case, in combination with the corpus analysis. The further perspectives of the research are corpus analysis of the same lexemes presented in tabloids and comparative analysis of the results obtained from the broadsheet The Guardian.

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