Interactive features in medical conference monologue

Academic lectures show formal and informal characteristics. Alongside passages of rigorous scientific reasoning, conference English may therefore be expected to contain many features identified by earlier studies as characteristic of the conversational mode, reflecting the ongoing interaction between speaker and listener. To find out whether these features constitute an important resource for creating a relationship with the audience, I analysed a corpus of scientific conference talks and searched for these features to consider why they are used and to what effect. The talks were also compared with a compatible corpus of written research articles and reviews on the same topic. The spoken corpus consisted of seven plenaries and seven paper presentations given at international medical conferences by competent speakers of English of various nationalities. The written corpus comprised six research articles and six review papers from reputed medical journals. The recordings of the spoken material were transcribed and the interactive features in the electronic version of the two corpora were detected and counted by computer. The features included in the study were: personal deictics, markers and imprecise quantifiers. The computer analysis showed that these features formed an integral part of the textual and interpersonal functions of an event influenced by the co-presence of interactants and the preliminary nature of the material presented. Many speakers were reporting work in progress rather than the finished product of the journal article. The recordings disclosed many instances of personal reference in the data, particularly I think, used either for purposes of hedging or for declarations of stance. A frequently occurring marker was now, used to indicate the structure of the text and the stepwise presentation of the argument. In contrast, several of the features under study were entirely absent from the written material. In conclusion, the spoken and written corpus differed markedly, probably because conference speakers rely heavily on interactive devices to create a rapport with the audience.