Linguistic features of American political correctness on the example of the implementation of the “People First” trend in modern English
Political correctness is one of the key values of the American society that characterizes the distinguishing features of the national mentality. The ideas of political correctness are quite vividly represented in American English at the lexical, syntactic and communicative levels. The authors attempt to study the language implementation of the “People First” trend that emerged in the United States in the early 1990s, using the example of transformations in the fi eld of medical terminology. Eliminating discrimination against people with physical and mental disabilities, rejecting expressions backed by negative stereotypes, are the main goals of the “People First” trend. The authors have analysed the background and history of this trend, and also described the lexical and syntactic features of euphemisms, which are the main tool of political correctness. An analysis of the materials of the meetings of the Commission on the Psychological Problems of Disability of the American Psychological Association made it possible to determine the list of the most “challenging” wordings and their “desirable” variants and to determine the peculiarities of lexical euphemization and complementary syntactic modifi cations. The study of political correctness as a social, cultural and linguistic phenomenon is relevant for modern linguistics and cultural linguistics, as it allows to get an idea of the English speakers’ mentality and world representation. The purpose of the paper is to describe linguistic features of euphemisms within the framework of medical terminology that appeared with the development of the “People First” trend, taking into account the recommendations of activists, doctors and psychologists. The use of methods of structural-syntactic, contextual, component, lexico-semantic analysis, as well as the method of continuous and cluster sampling made it possible to identify the special features of the implementation of the studied trend in language, culture and modern communication.
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