The popularisation of scientific discourse for the Academia from a diachronic perspective: the case of Nobel lectures

In-depth investigation has been recently carried out about the popularization discourse. Despite the different perspectives such investigation moves from, the language of popularization is overall seen as a reformulation and re-contextualization of scientific knowledge. In other words, it is not seen as a distorted simplification of scientific knowledge for non-specialists, because the process of reformulation and re-contextualization has a more direct form due to the action of the different agents, voices and genres. Starting from this assumption, the present research aims at disclosing how and to what extent scientific knowledge has been rendered in popularized forms by members of the medical academic community for an academic audience such as the Nobel Prize one. The study analyses twenty Nobel lectures assigned between 1900 and 2009 (one for decade) which are put in comparison with the BASE corpus of academic lectures. The investigation carried out in this study seems to suggest that there are differences in the communication strategies adopted to render scientific knowledge into effective popularized 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.