WHAT IS POPULARISATION?
Dr Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo, New Trends in Popularisation: Linguistic and Communicative strategies in TED Talks. Popularisation “is a social process consisting of a large class of discursive-semiotic practices […] aiming to communicate lay versions of scientific knowledge”. (Calsamiglia & van Dijk 2004: 371). This means that science popularisation allows everyone to understand scientific knowledge. In the past, there was a clear-cut distinction between scientific and popularised texts. According to this perspective, science is built on a hermetic language that needs to be “translated‟ from the science world to a popularised context. The audience was seen as an ignorant mass on which the scientific community has the power to decide what has to be known and what not. Only during the last decade, studies on professional-lay interaction have focussed more on mass media, which constitute a triangular communication space, a “meeting point‟ between scientists, the ...
