REPRESENTING HEALTH: MENTALITY, ETHICS, AND PERSUASION IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN MEDICAL DISCOURSE

This article examines how ethical orientations, persuasive strategies, and culturally grounded mental representations of health are constructed in English and Russian medical discourse. Combining associative evidence, corpus analysis, and pragmaticrhetorical examination, the research identifies the interplay between professional ethics (deontological vs. patientcentered), linguatherapeutic strategies, and cultural scripts that shape patient care narratives. The English subcorpus (Leipzig Corpora Collection) and Russian associative resources (Ufimtseva & Cherkasova; Selezneva et al.) were analyzed using sememe interpretation (Total Brightness Index), rhetorical move analysis, and pragmatic coding of modality and mitigation. Results show convergences (health as a universal axiologeme; medicine linked to science) and divergences: English medical discourse foregrounds specialist credentials, evidencebased persuasion, and lifestyle/preventive framing; Russian medical discourse foregrounds institutional conditions, procedural descriptions, and ambivalent evaluative reactions (e.g., бессильна). Ethical language in English tends to emphasize autonomy and informed consent; in Russian it more often encodes duty, paternalism, and state responsibility (including the notion of free medicine). The paper proposes practical recommendations for translation, intercultural clinician training, and the design of bilingual patient information that respects differing mentality features.