Entre la ciencia y el mercadola divulgación médica a través de la publicidad escrita

Résumé

This article analyses the different mechanisms of medical divulgation language concerning pharmaceutical products. In this way two kinds of advertisements are distinguished: a) advertisements from experts to experts, which have an evident informative intention and include a great amount of medical terms; and b) advertisements from experts to non-expert audiences, which convey not only an informative but also a persuasive intention, and which exhibit a lesser amount of technical terms. In the end this article means to show that the change of audience and purpose determine the linguistic features and the discourse strategies implied in a given utterance: on the one hand, there is an obvious difference between specialized versus nonspecialized audiences; and on the other, while general audiences are expected to buy the aforementioned products, the role of doctors is just to prescribe them.