The cognitive aspect of English articles in medical discourse

The paper is devoted to the cognitive aspect of English articles in contemporary English medical discourse. It considers the use of articles with the names of some infectious diseases that caused pandemics in the past and may, for obvious reason, pose a serious danger to mankind at present and in the future. It is assumed that in modern English discourse the names of the given infectious diseases have acquired or may acquire a special deictic form — the definite article that indicates the highly emotional perception of those diseases by English speaking community as particularly dangerous not only for a single person but for mankind as a whole. Thus, it is stated that the metasemiotic function of the definite article that gives the noun a supplementary meaning makes it a marker of discourse emotional perception. The paper determines the difference in deictic forms of names for dangerous infectious diseases (the definite article/the zero article) that are treated in modern English grammars as exceptions. It has been shown that this variation depends on historical and sociolinguistic factors as well as on the kind of medical discourse — whether it is an abstract list of specific symptoms of the disease or a reference book for a non-professional that refers to the emotional experience of the English speaking person. The paper concludes that the variation in deictic form of the name of the disease (the coronavirus/coronavirus) that caused the present pandemic and has become a real threat to the well-being of mankind can be explained by purely cognitive reasons. It is stated that the emotional perception of this disease in the English speaking society at the beginning of the pandemic when it seemed to be a deadly and incurable illness is similar to the one that could be observed in the past in relation to the Spanish flu of 1918-1920 or the plague that several times depopulated European countries in the Middle Ages and in the 17th century. Such attitude to the disease is typical of English speaking society at the beginning of the pandemic. It is this emotional perception that was fixed in the use of the definite article with the name of the disease in publications of that period.