Pragmatic support of medical recommendations in popularized texts

In order to be successful, speech acts that are intended to get the hearer to do something are often accompanied by supporting utterances aimed at making him/her understand their communicative purpose and, accept it as appropriate, as well as enabling him/her to perform the requested action. The purpose of this article is to determine the type of utterances that support recommendations in a corpus of popularizing medical texts published in two major Argentinean newspapers. The analysis shows that the most frequent supporting functions are those aimed at the acceptance of the communicative purpose. Also, supporting functions have been analyzed in terms of the speakers' acceptance of responsibility, i.e., we have considered whether supporting functions are (re-)formulated as a direct or indirect quotation of the information source or are formulated by the reporter. Findings show that a high percentage of supporting functions that justify recommendations are formulated as a direct quotation of the specialist's voice.