Specialized Communication and Popularization in English

This book provides a comprehensive account of the linguistic and discursive aspects of domain-specific communication in its various registers, from highly specialized to popularizing, taking an essentially descriptive approach. It first focuses on the aspects of specialized texts that are recurrent across domains and qualify as common distinctive traits of scientific and technological communication today. Attention then shifts to popularization, with a discussion of the main linguistic and discursive strategies enacted to make expert knowledge accessible to the lay public. Some specific popularizing genres – both traditional and web-mediated – are used as case studies (news articles, research institutions’ press releases, science news blogs, Wikipedia entries, TED Talks). The account of domain-specific communication provided is based on in-depth analyses carried out with qualified and updated analytical tools which are also introduced in some detail (word formation, terminology, syntax, textuality, discourse, genre) with examples of their application in the actual analysis of authentic texts. The description is often extended comparatively to Italian, to promote an awareness of the similarities and differences between the two languages in domain-specific genres, with a section devoted to some basic aspects of specialized translation. Throughout the discussion, plenty of examples are provided to substantiate the analysis, all of them authentic.