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