Politeness of a doctor in the mirror of consumer reviews

The article examines the politeness of medical workers – how it is reflected in the genre of reviews on the consumption of medical services published on the Internet. Methodologically, the work fits into the traditions of discourse studies, semantic and stylistic studies. Theoretically, the article is based on the ideas of media linguistics, discourse studies, genre studies, semantic syntax and stylistics. An analysis of a small corpus of texts of the named genre published on the official website of the Ministry of Health of the Novgorod Region allowed us to establish that politeness as a parameter of speech behavior and at the same time a characteristic of the doctor’s attitude to a patient is among the parameters of medical communication regularly assessed by patients and their relatives. In reviews, the discussion of politeness brings to the forefront such parameters as readiness to communicate, genre repertoire, the importance of non-verbal means of communication – particularly a smile – and perlocutionary effects of polite utterances. The paper describes the range of linguistic means used to describe the doctors’ speech, such as lexemes, analytical expressions, and idioms. It is concluded that politeness is differentiated along the lines of communication spheres, discourse, genre and social type of communicators. The paper also outlines the prospects for further research of the topic in the context of discourse analysis, media linguistics and linguodidactics.