LINKD 2012 Workshop - Language(s) In Knowledge Dissemination. Modena, 11-13 October 2012. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Knowledge Dissemination (KD) has become increasingly important in modern society for the socio-economic and cultural development of citizens. The issue of how experts communicate their specialist knowledge to lay-people has been widely discussed in the press and is often tackled in terms of "translating" otherwise exclusive knowledge into more comprehensible language. Comprehensibility can be seen as a matter of simplification, explicitation or formulation in terms that are suitable to the level of knowledge of the addressee. The issue can also be studied in terms of re-contextualizing knowledge. As the applied linguistics literature on popularising is not extensive, useful indications can come from studies on intercultural communication, when looking at KD as "mediation" of knowledge between members of different communities, each with their peculiar cultural and communicative practices. KD can be seen as an example of "inter-discourse communication" i.e. communication that cuts across the boundaries of discourse communities characterized by different types of knowledge. While the issue of KD has often been studied in relation to sciences that require exclusive expertise - e.g. chemistry or physics, the LINKD workshop would like to consider both "hard" and "soft" sciences. The objective of the workshop is to explore the language processes involved in KD in a theoretical, descriptive and applied perspective. In particular, it aims to provide a clearer definition of the nature of popularizing discourse, by means of an analysis of its strategies across disciplines and languages, also including the discursive construction of professional identity and intercultural communication, a closer lexical investigation of specific domains, the deployment of lexicographic tools and an investigation of the use of visual elements in popularisation. Two complementary strands of linguistic investigation - corpus analysis and genre analysis - will be brought together to ascertain how far KD is actually characterized by intense use of metadiscourse, forms of readers' engagement, systematic use of definitions, reformulation, higher degrees of explicitness, careful use of word-image relationship. The basic strands of analysis concern: i) intralinguistic analysis of the recontextualization process that leads from a specialized texts to its popularization outside the circle of domain-specific experts; ii) multilingual analysis of the internal features of knowledge dissemination, aimed at defining its strategies in different genres, media, domains; iii) thematic exploration of the multiple formats of KD, ranging from introductory readings to scientific reports, travel literature or children's books.