AELFE 2025: ROSA LORÉS & SILVIA MURILLO DEAL WITH POLYPHONY IN ONLINE POPULARISING MAGAZINES

Alongside other InterGedi members, Dr Rosa Lorés and Dr Silvia Murillo-Ornat co-presented a paper during the AELFE Conference, which was held over the span of three days (25th-27th June 2025). This 23rd edition was celebrated at Universitat Jaume I and was organised by members from the GRAPE research group.

Dr Lorés and Dr Murillo-Ornat investigated the notion of polyphony in their presentation entitled “Polyphonic patterns in digital science recontextualization: The case of popularizations in online magazines”. In particular, their paper served to throw light on the understanding of how the voices of journalists, locutors and other enunciators combined to enhance credibility and elicit engagement.

Have a look at the abstract below:

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Polyphonic patterns in digital science recontextualization: The case of popularizations in online magazines

The communication of science serves many purposes (informative, persuasive, pedagogic, instructional) and takes many forms, ranging from conventional academic genres written by experts (research articles, books, critical reviews) to popularizing practices, which currently leverage digital media (publications in online magazines, social media platforms, collaborative sites like The Conversation, blog posts, etc.). Popularizing scientific discourse is typically written by science journalists or scriptwriters who mediate between scientists and the general public. These mediators recontextualize (and repurpose) the expert knowledge generated by researchers to make it accessible to lay audiences. Recontextualizing processes have discursive impacts that need to be explored and measured; one of them is the interpretation of the text as a polylogue, where different voices combine and interact. Drawing on the notions of evidentiality (Aikhenvald, 2004) and polyphony (Ducrot, 1984) we explore how the locutor’s voice is combined with those of other locutors and enunciators. For this purpose, a corpus of 30 scientific feature articles on the topic of physical and mental health will serve as a database. Three research questions will be studied: 1) How is the journalist’s voice explicitly combined with those of other locutors and enunciators (by means of direct/indirect speech)? 2) How are these other locutors and enunciators (both experts and non-experts) introduced in the text? And how are hyperlinks presented as enunciators? 3) What is the interaction between reported speech and hyperlinks? How is this “confluence” of voices managed? Close readings and the use of the software NVivo will allow us to generate qualitative and quantitative data that provide answers to these questions. Preliminary results reveal that the affordances of digital media are behind a variety of innovative polyphonic patterns that, together with more traditional forms of reported speech, help journalists develop their discourse, while fostering credibility and engagement.

References

Aikhenvald, A.Y. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford University Press.

Ducrot, O. (1984). Esquisse d’une théorie polyphonique de l’énonciation. In O. Ducrot (Ed.), Le dire et le dit (pp. 171-233). Minuit.