Discourse of Drug Information for Experts and Patients
25also extends to other aspects such as syntax and argumentation patterns
(see examples 6 and 7 below). Importantly, specialized discourse also
reflects the principles underlying scientific knowledge as well as its
organization. This becomes manifest in the discourse of SmPCs, which
exhibits typical properties of expert knowledge such as providing
knowledge about a drug's composition, and form (Figure 2).
As the structures of specialized discourse on the one hand, and
(abstract) knowledge on the other (Footnote 6) are deviant, it also deserves
some closer attention how specialized knowledge is expressed by
specialized discourse. First of all, we may assume that (specialized)
discourse is not a one-to-one reproduction of (specialized) knowledge, as
the former is inherently linear, whereas the epistemic organization of the
mind is multidimensional. This means that knowledge is in some way or
another ‘linearized’ in discourse (van Dijk 2003: 30). In addition, not all
aspects of everyday and/or specialized knowledge are explicitly expressed
in discourse, but only instantiated in the representation of specific
situations. As further elaborated in section 4 we may assume that language
users develop mental models of events and situations that are on the one
hand a selection of general knowledge as well as descriptions of
particularized events, situations and their participants on the other (van
Dijk 2003: 31). This also holds regarding specialized discourse, which
may express both general and particularized knowledge. Obviously,
specialized discourse requires-such as general discourse-contextualization
(embracing deictic expressions, word order, hedges, style, etc.) in order to
represent concrete events or situations. The reason is that meaning is only
partially expressed in the surface structure of a text, large parts remaining
implicit as the recipient is assumed to be able to infer this implicit
knowledge from the explicit propositions due to his/her world and domain
knowledge. The notion of mental model (see supra and Section 4)
accounts for this implicit discourse meaning (Johnson-Laird, 1983; van
Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; van Oostendorp & Goldman, 1999; van Dijk
2003).^8
General discourse as used in PILs, by contrast, reverts in the first place
to Common Ground knowledge and everyday experiences, for example
about drugs and medical topics. It is based on social-culturally shared
general knowledge (which, ultimately, also forms the basis of specialized
(^8) In this context it is important to note that knowledge (general and specialized) is
not a textual property, but rather a property of text producers and receivers and
their communities, which means that “knowledge can be considered as being part
of an important category of the context (of use) of a discourse [...]” (van Dijk
(2003: 22).