The Promotional Discourse in Scientific Popularization Articles for Young Readers

Abstract

This paper deals with the presence of promotional discourse in scientific popularization texts published in Ciência Hoje das Crianças (CHC) magazine. Observing articles published in CHC, we verified the presence of a discursive aim of incitation directed at young readers. We hypothesized that the promotional discourse could be evidenced in those texts and investigated, in a corpus of 30 texts, the communicational and discursive characteristics of this discourse. The analysis results corroborated our hypothesis, once we found the presence of narrative and argumentative schemes as strategies to make the reader believe that he/she has to do something. We also observed an intention to provoke actions, through scientific popularization, that promote individual or social well-being, valorizing the scientific knowledge and establishing a relation between science and social life. The articles revealed hybridism of domains: scientific, mediatic, didactic, and promotional. We related the presence of promotional discourse to a Contextual Model of public communication of science.