Popularizing medical discourse: the role of captions

In the last decades, several studies have been concerned with the analysis of the discourse of popularization (see for example Shinn/ Whitley 1985; Gregory/Miller 1998; Myers 1997, 2003; Ciapuscio 2003; Calsamiglia/Van Dijk 2004). Many scholars have been interested in the language adopted by journalists and media professionals when dealing with scientific research articles and have focused in particular on the linguistic features of popularizing texts. This line of research has often analysed journalists’ products in comparison with the original research articles in scientific journals, pointing out several differences at various levels, such as textual, syntactic and rhetorical levels (Myers 1990, 1991, 1994; Calsamiglia 2003). Furthermore, particular interest has been placed on those linguistic strategies enacted in order to enhance lay readers’ comprehension such as the use of metaphors (Gülich 2003) and other expressive functions (e.g. definition, denomination, description, exemplification, generalization, paraphrase or reformulation; cf. Calsamiglia/Van Dijk 2004; Garzone 2006). As far as the definition of popularization is concerned, this process has often been identified as a ‘social operation’ aimed at communicating lay versions of scientific knowledge among the public at large (Jacobi 1999; Calsamiglia/Van Dijk 2004). The discourse of popularization is a pluricode discourse in which text, images, stylesheets and colours semantically interact (Lemke 1998; Miller 1998) through a multimodal approach (Gotti 2013). As Bontems (2013: 103) argues, images are fundamental to the construction of scientific knowledge for a lay audience since they influence the reader’s sensitivity, thus 88 Silvia Cavalieri enhancing comprehension. The journalist is the mediator between science and its popularization and he/she chooses the right images and, in the case of complex technical ones, he/she adapts them to the supposed background knowledge of their public (Jacobi 1999; Bontems 2013). Even though in the last years many studies have claimed the importance of images in the field of science popularization (see among others Jacobi 1999; Bontems 2013; Dondero 2013; Lathene-Da Cunha 2013), little attention has been paid to the role of captions in the process of conveying specialist knowledge for a wider audience of nonspecialists (Myers 1997). In order to fill this gap in the literature, the present work aims at providing an introductory description of captions in the discourse of medicine through the media, focusing in particular on three comparable corpora of news collected from the medicine sections of French, English and Italian online magazines of science popularization. To be more specific, the study deals with the popularizing strategies used in the captions and their relation with the news and the image they refer to. Moreover, the use of captions is compared in the three languages to highlight similarities or differences in their use in order to see what strategies are typical of popularization discourse in different cultures