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Engaging the listener in the dissemination of academic knowledge: Clusivity and referentiality in neuroscience podcast popularizations for non-specialist audiences
Dalarna University, School of Language, Literatures and Learning.
2024 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

Popularization discourse (PD) disseminates academic knowledge to non-academic audiences through reformulation and recontextualization of the content (Gotti, 2014), which makes it more relatable and engaging. There are a number of strategies which researchers employ to create engagement, one of which is the choice of appropriate pronouns, especially the first-person plural we and its related forms us, let’s and our. Depending on the context their clusivity changes and their use can be either inclusive or exclusive, thus creating varying degrees of proximity between the speaker and the audience. To date, only limited research has been done on clusivity in spoken PD (but see e.g. Compagnone, 2005; Scotto di Carlo, 2018) and nothing has been done on podcasts, specifically. This study investigates clusivity and referentiality in neuroscientific guest episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast by looking at randomized examples (n=2,933) of the uses of we, us, let’s and our across 52 transcripts. The framework applied is a revised and combined version of Scheibman’s (2004) taxonomy of we and Fortanet’s (2004) framework for the referentiality of we. The findings show two types of clusivity being the most dominant in the corpus: 1) inclusive plural with referentiality to humans and 2) exclusive plural with two types of referentiality: podcast and expert. This sheds light on how podcast speakers engaged non-specialist audiences in PD. The corpus analysis also revealed many recurring patterns including we or related forms which serve five functions: call for action, engagement, introduction, sponsorship and social media. The results seem to be in partial agreement with the findings in PD TED Talks of Compagnone (2015) and with the findings of Scotto di Carlo (2018).

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024.
Keywords [en]
popularization discourse, spoken discourse, podcast, clusivity, referentiality
National Category
Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:du-50291OAI: oai:DiVA.org:du-50291DiVA, id: diva2:1942528
Subject / course
English
Available from: 2025-03-05 Created: 2025-03-05 Last updated: 2025-10-09

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fulltext(1432 kB)138 downloads
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Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf