Linguistic and Extralinguistic Strategies of Hybridization, Simplification and Reformulation in English and Italian Multimodal Popularized Discourse

This paper explores the linguistic and audiovisual features of medical-discourse reformulation in a selected corpus of English and Italian scripts from the TV shows 1000 Ways to Die (1000 modi per morire), Curious and Unusual Deaths (Strani modi per morire), and Rare Anatomy (Rare Anatomy: Casi estremi), which actualize new forms of popularization by mixing journalistic, documentary and humorous discourses with reality-TV and docudrama genres. The analysis is grounded on a cognitive-functional approach, according to which the authors’ mental representation of the implied receivers in uences the process of text construction, thus aiming at making specialized knowledge more accessible by means of different strategies of speech hybridization that are tailored to the imagined audience. In particular, regarding source-text production, the authors of the first and second TV shows seem to have in mind male viewers, since they resort to a specific integration between taboo jokes, derogatory humour and lexical reformulation accessible to non-experts. At the same time, the third TV series adopts mainly the conventional strategies of linguistic simplification to explain specialized knowledge, along with the emotional presentation of real stories about rare diseases. The analysis focuses on the interaction between the extralinguistic features and verbal characteristics of audiovisual scripts so as to help describe multimodal popularization, which can now be found in a number of different text types, from magazines to sitcoms. Finally, this study also inquires into the extent to which the lexical, structural and functional dimensions of the selected corpus of target versions stem from the interaction between the equivalent reformulation of medical discourse and the respect for the technical limits of voice-over.