Peculiarities of Heroization of Health Care Workers in the Mass Media Discourse during a Pandemic

Abstract

The article examines the linguistic features of the heroization of medical workers in the mass media discourse during the pandemic of the novel coronavirus infection. During the fight against the spread of the coronavirus, doctors acquired the status of heroes. The heroic image of a doctor who is at the forefront of the fight against a new threat is fully expressed in various discursive and non-discursive constructs: mass media discourse, creolized texts, photo and video materials, comments from users of the Internet services, etc. The headlines of publications, the names of projects, competitions, and actions indicate the heroization of doctors. The process of heroization is also implemented in creolized texts of social advertising. The main linguistic means of heroization is metaphorization: the doctor is represented as a soldier in war, a superhero, a guardian angel. So, in the studied texts, the fight against the coronavirus is metaphorically represented as a war, medical personnel – as soldiers fighting with weapons in their hands against a terrible enemy – the virus, the walls of a medical institution – as a battlefield. As a result of the study, it is revealed that there is a tendency to local heroization and concretization of the heroic on the examples of real people