Revista de Llengua i Dret - Journal of Language and Law (Dec 2021)
Popularization strategies as discursive tools to mediate legal knowledge in online forums
Abstract
Modern information technologies allow us to disseminate specialized knowledge through ask-an-expert forums that serve as a resource for transforming specialized concepts for a lay audience. This paper aims to add to the study of discourse production and is intended as a contribution to legal communication from a popularization-centered perspective. It considers the popularization of legal knowledge to a lay audience as a process of discursive accommodation to the reader’s knowledge base and of alignment of the cognitive levels of participants in asymmetrical interactions intermediated by explanatory strategies. Through the analysis of online legal-lay communication, the article builds a classification model of discursive strategies that allow experts, including forum lawyers, to represent complex and abstract specialized content in an intelligible way to prevent communicative problems from emerging and communicate efficiently. The findings illustrate how various popularization strategies function to align the cognitive levels of participants and eliminate knowledge asymmetries. Two types of strategy (popularization by formulation and reformulation and popularization by illustration) are analyzed and assessed. Definition as a type of popularization by reformulation, comprising 42% of all strategies found in the corpus, is the most common explanatory strategy. Metaphors employed to popularize legal knowledge by relating specialized and everyday domains of experience are the least common explanatory tools used by forum lawyers. These explanatory strategies can be combined to jointly contribute to the purpose of accommodating legal information to the knowledge base of lay forum users. This study is a vector for investigating the problems of asymmetrical interactions in institutional settings. The methodology or aspects of asymmetrical exchanges can be expanded and become an avenue for further research.
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