Abstract

In private or public communication, the successful transmission of information depends on a variety of decisions involving pragma-discursive strategies such as simplification, transparency and clarity, which are meant to make the message understandable to the wider public. Science popularization is paramount to provide non-experts with scientific evidence to help them make informed decisions and take action in multiple aspects of their lives, including their health and wellbeing. When communicating to a lay audience, recontextualization strategies (e.g., Calsamiglia & van Dijk, 2004; Gotti, 2014) are widely used to illustrate complex concepts and define science jargon that may otherwise be unfamiliar. Adopting a corpus-assisted approach, this study investigates explanatory strategies in a corpus of 24 spoken science popularization texts on nutrition. Specifically, the corpus consists of broadcast interviews, TED Talks and YouTube videos/podcasts where professionals discuss nutrition facts to educate their audience on how their diet choices can hinder or promote wellbeing. The first step of the study entails the extraction of scientific jargon with corpus analysis software SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014); the second step consists in the manual filtering of concordance lines of the selected terms; finally, identified explicatory strategies will be categorized and contextualized within popularization discourse.

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