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The research explores the language of health promotion used in Health matters and Tak zdorovo – the national healthcare websites of the UK and Russia. The objective is to assess readability of the British and Russian texts as well as to reveal language properties and cultural implications of health promotion in national digital media. The comparative design of the study involves qualitative (contextual and interpretative) and quantitative (Compleat Lexical Tutor v.8.5 and Flesch-Kincaid grade) methods. The topic distribution results show that physical activity, healthy eating and weight control, tobacco smoking, alcohol dependence, mental health are raised in both cultures, however, the British corpus puts more emphasis on mental health issues compared to the Russian one. There are differences in ‘positive’ vs ‘negative’ approach in covering alcohol consumption issues. The findings on readability reveal higher rates of lexical density and lexical variety in the Russian corpus in comparison to the British one. However, the overall lexical coverage and readability index in the British (K-3) and Russian corpora (SIS – 8.68) are equally low, which means that the language of health promotion in both cultures is easy to understand. The Russian language of advice demonstrates frequent use of imperatives. The British corpus employs less categorical recommendation forms including modal verbs, create partnering communication styles and demonstrate a higher use of visual forms of health promotion. The findings revealing differences in rhetoric strategies (rational reasoning in British digital media vs emotional reasoning in Russian digital media) can be attributed to national and cultural implications.

The article discusses specific aspects of medical research texts. The author argues that academicity is one of the basic properties of research medical texts and analyses the way it is manifested in Russian research papers of the medical corpus. The study involves full-text medical articles published in the peer-reviewed scientific and practical journal “Bulletin of Siberian Medicine”, which is included in international databases. The coefficient of lexical diversity, lexical, grammatical and stylistic means of academicity manifestation are the main parameters for the study. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that Russian-language texts are characterized by a higher coefficient of lexical diversity and contain more unique lexemes than texts of the English-language corpus. Special attention is paid to the use of first-person pronouns: their number is relatively low, which indicates that the researchers’ position is not actively expressed in the papers. Other aspects that are considered to be manifestations of the academic style in the texts of the Russian-speaking authors are as follows: the use of a significant number of adjectives and international character of the texts, which is due to the presence of a large number of cognate words. In general, it is noted that academic style is manifested at all levels of text organization. The study has important applied value, since the knowledge of the properties of the academic style will help healthcare professionals to create high-quality articles for presentation of the results of their research.

The paper discusses academic formality as a basic linguistic and stylistic property which indicates academic discourse. The objective of the research is to identify specific features and means of formality representation in medical discourse. The material of the research includes a corpus comprised of fifteen authentic open – access research articles published in European Journal of Epidemiology in 2019. The texts of the articles were processed within the framework of descriptive linguistic analysis. The quantitative analysis and statistic processing was performed with Compleat Lexical Tutor v.8.3. The results of the research have revealed lexical, syntactical, grammatical and stylistic means of formality representation in medical research texts. The lexical diversity coefficient ranges from 0.22 to 2.27, which demonstrates a high level of vocabulary complexity and a relatively low level of vocabulary diversity. The high level of lexical density is acquired by a frequent use of noun groups, nominalization and medical terminology including abbreviations and acronyms. Stylistic repetitions of vocabulary and syntactic structures are registered on all texts of the research corpus. Along with a widespread use of passive and impersonal structures the texts of the research have demonstrated a tendency to use subjective language (we / our pronouns) for an author stance. The authors have made a conclusion that this might be an indication of a shift towards simplicity and ersonification in academic formality representation.