Every day, web browsers receive 7.5 million health-related queries, of which 16% are searches for medical organizations and practitioners. As a result, online reviews affect the reputation of medical professionals and healthcare institutions. Verbal aggression in medical internet discourse is expressed through particular linguistic and stylistic means. This study identifies and systematizes the linguistic markers of aggressive speech behavior in negative patient reviews; specifically, 250 verified reviews from the ProDoctorov platform underwent stylistic, contextual, and communicative-pragmatic analyses. After clarifying the concept of speech aggression in relation to online medical discourse, the article analyzes the linguistic and stylistic means of speech aggression in online reviews of medical services, as well as the ratio of open and hidden aggression. The resulting profile shows the specifics of medical discourse as an environment that provokes aggressive speech behavior. This multi-level analysis of verbal aggression applied to a specialized segment of medical internet discourse shows that such aggression is realized through emotionally and evaluatively charged vocabulary with negative connotations, expressive syntactic constructions (parcellation, inversion, and exclamatory sentences), and a stylistic contrast between colloquial and official-formal registers. Nearly 50% of the texts reveal implicit aggression disguised as objective argumentation through irony, innuendos, and allusions. The findings may be applied in forensic linguistic expertise and used to develop recommendations for the reputation management of healthcare organizations.
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Shishkina et al. (2026) studied this question.
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