LOGIC-COMPOSITIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE TEXTOTYPE “MEDICAL INSTRUCTION”

Abstract

The article refers to the special logic-compositional structure of the textotype “medical instruction” of three German pharmaceutical companies Bayer, Ratiopharm, Heel. This structure relies on two cognitive-discursive components – universal and individual. The universal component is common to each instruction (name of the drug or medicinal product, its purpose, usage, side effects, dosage, storage conditions), and the individual component is distinctive for each single medical instruction and with no common features. The individual components include the name of the drug, conditions of use, dosage and storage, use with other drugs, special instructions – all that is unique to a particular drug. Nevertheless, we found some deviations in the structure of medical instructions in the universal component for the drugs, which were produced by the manufacturer of pharmaceuticals Heel. The specifics of the genre “medical instruction” is linked to the vertical construction of the information presentation in writing and the consistent implementation of the regulatory and informative element of the text, which is foreseen in an interactive model of instructions for drugs. The genre model of an official business document is dominant in the cognitive card of the medical instruction. The genre model of the text “medical instruction” is characterized by integration into the set of relations and relationships of the components of the medical discourse map. The exclusion of one component from the text of the instructions for the drug or its lack during the usage of drugs by patients leads to a violation of the entire system of conditional communication between the addresser and the addressee, as disconnection occurs between them. The compositional interaction of the semantic and structural aspects of medical instruction makes it possible to take into account the interaction of the content and the scheme of its presentation. The medical instruction unfolds both in the direction from deep to surface structure, and in the linear direction. This allows us to distinguish two principles of text organization for the drug – volume and linear.