Popularising scientific discourse for an academic audience: the case of Nobel lectures

The language of popularisation has been the object of in-depth investigations from various perspectives. The overall idea is that it is not a distorted simplification of scientific knowledge for non-specialists but rather a reformulation and re-contextualization of scientific knowledge in a more direct form. Starting from this assumption, the present research aims at disclosing how and to what extent scientific knowledge is rendered in popularised language by members of the medical academic community for an academic audience, such as that of the Nobel Prize lectures. The investigation seems to suggest that there are differences in the communication strategies adopted to render scientific knowledge into effective popularised language, constructed as a set of communicative events which involve the transformation and recontextualization of specialist discourse. In this sense, it is primarily featured by the properties of the communicative context in which it takes place: participants and their role, their purposes, beliefs and knowledge.