Linguistic and pragmatic, functional and stylistic characteristics of advertising and medical subdiscourse

There is a corpus of texts which can be found in the overlapping area of advertising and medical discourses. These texts can form a specific advertising and medical subdiscourse on the basis of their mutual basic characteristic features that are different from medical or advertising ones. This subdiscourse results from interdiscourse interaction: the communication is performed in the medical sphere, whereas communicative intention of some agents belongs to the advertising discourse. The purpose of our research was to describe the advertising and medical subdiscourse and reveal its basic characteristic features. We analyzed adapted secondary texts and simplified primary texts of different written speech genres. The article describes the participants of the advertising and medical subdiscourse, their role in communication, and the subdiscourse functions. It was revealed that the advertising and medical subdiscourse differs from a medical discourse in its performative function. We studied the style of the texts belonging to this subdiscourse, and identified its communicative features that involve the following basic strategies: manipulation, presentation and popularization. Manipulation is carried out through text compression in adapted secondary texts and through appealing to readers' emotional sphere in primary texts. Presentation strategy involves choosing the most relevant information for the addressee, and the most suitable type of information (creolization of the text or its parts). Popularization strategy involves providing the specialized information in the simplest way possible, so that it would be comprehensible for the lay audience. Since the performative purpose of the advertising and medical subdiscourse is aimed at the goods promotion, the texts of this subdiscourse are focused on the lay audience, they are meant to appeal to potential buyers and make them choose specific goods. Accordingly, these texts use simplified syntactic structures, replace terms with hyperonyms or paraphrases explaining the corresponding signified, and operate with everyday vocabulary.