Discourse of Drug Information for Experts and Patients
39converted from the domain of TIME to the domain of SPACE by means of
the nominalization reduction (SmPC):
(12) Reduction of cardiovascular morbidity in adults [...]
(13) Telmisartan Teva Pharma is also used to reduce cardiovascular events
[...]Moreover, the above examples describe the effect of the drug
Telmisartan by different construals that express specific subjective
vantage points from which the perspective is taken. Example (12) renders
the embodied viewpoint of the implicit expert (author respective reader of
SmPC), which has the following linguistic implications. In morpho-
syntactic terms, the expert description consists of a reduced phrasal form
of a more complex sentence as used in example (13). The nominalization
reduction (which functions as head of the following sequence of
prepositional phrases introducing the direct object (of cardiovascular
morbidity in adults) makes that the animate agent (i.e. the doctor who
initially uses the drug as an instrument to improve cardiovascular
morbidity) as well as the instrument (Telmisartan) remains implicit. As a
result, the referent scene is presented from a synoptic perspectival mode,
expressing the inherently sequential mode and causal sequence of the
separate events inherent to the action of reducing as a unitary event. We
may assume that this elliptical nominal structure is derived from
syntactically deeper structures of a different form that is more closely
reflected in the surface structures of the patient version (example 13).
Here, the instrument role of Telmisartan is explicitated in the surface
structure by the passive verbal description is used to reduce, which
highlights at the same time the temporal aspect of the action as well as its
purpose. The volitional agents and other (animate) participants in the
scene (i.e. medical doctor and patient) remain implicit in this passive
construction, the focus being on the action and the instrument in subject
position. The syntactic distribution of prominent vs. less prominent
participants is a significant aspect of the corpus under investigation, and
will be further detailed in the following section.
Figure and Ground
Construals may have different dimensions, one of which is the well-known
Figure-Ground distinction (Talmy 1978; Langacker 2007: 435). The
Figure is the element that is the focus of attention, whereas the Ground
represents the elements out of scope. In both text types under investigation
many facets are implicitly present in the experts’ and patients’