The popularization of science in web-based genres

This paper investigates popularizing features in the recent Knowledge Dissemination (KD) genre of TED talks, a series of speeches aimed at a non specialist audience. TED speakers are experts in their field – often top level academics or from important research institutes – but are also people who have had remarkable experiences or accomplished outstanding achievements. These short talks are made freely available on the web by TED, a non-profit organisation devoted to disseminating ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ , and involve a wide variety of domains, ranging from the humanities to science and technology. The evidence, collected from a large corpus of transcribed recordings of TED talks, is discussed here with reference to the textual processes employed in popularizations in order to relate abstract and complex information to the audience’s everyday life and experience. In particular, the corpus of TED talks is examined in relation to aspects such as argumentation, rhetorical structures and discourse organisation, drawing on the methods and instruments of corpus linguistics, textual linguistics, pragmatics and genre analysis.