Therapy Speak as a Marker of the Language Taste of the Era in Media Discourse (Based on Belarusian Media Texts)

Authors:
Gladko M.A.
Abstract:

In contemporary media discourse, social, political, and cultural events are increasingly described through psychotherapy vocabulary, which serves as a ready-made language for audiences to interpret reality, evaluate, and comprehend events. This article examines the functioning of psychotherapeutic vocabulary using Belarusian online newspaper and television texts for the period 2021−2026. The research methodology includes contextual, distributional, linguopragmatic, and comparative analyzes, as well as thematic coding. It has been established that, despite thematic specialization with a maximum concentration in the areas of interpersonal relationships and work, psychotherapeutic vocabulary is recorded in various thematic dominants of the media text, including those not directly related to psychological issues (politics, economics, ecology, sports, etc.). This regular occurrence, even at low density, testifies to the expansion and universalization of psychotherapeutic vocabulary as a tool for interpreting and evaluating social and political processes. The scales of expansion of its syntagmatic connections are identified (thematic, gradual («concrete — abstract»), temporal, «particular — general» («individual — collective»), «usual — occasional» («standard — creative»)). In media discourse, psychotherapeutic vocabulary enters into combinations with nouns of various semantic groups (zoonyms, institutional sphere, nominating socio-psychological concepts, resource categories, everyday objects, affective states), which indicates its lingua-creative potential. The article substantiates that psychotherapeutic vocabulary acts as a universal tool for interpreting reality, emotional assessment, and lingua-creative play, and its regular use forms a psychologized linguistic taste in media discourse. Based on objective indicators, a scale of stability/rootedness of vocabulary in media discourse has been developed, which allows for a quantitative assessment of the degree of implementation of psychotherapeutic vocabulary and its interpretation as a marker of linguistic fashion.

Key words:
media discourseBelarusain mass medialanguage fashionpsychotherapy culturetherapy speaklexical compatibilitypragmatic functions
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