If MSM are frequent testers there are more opportunities to test them”: conditionals in medical posters – a corpus-based approach

Poster sessions at scientific conferences made their first appearance in the US at the Biochemistry/Biophysics 1974 Meeting. Since then posters have rapidly become a major format for scientific communication at conferences and other scientific meetings.
Despite the importance of posters in the hard sciences, the analysis of this genre seems to have been neglected from the applied linguistics perspective. This may depend on the fact that posters are commonly regarded as less prestigious than research papers (Swales, 2004; Swales/Feak, 2000), an idea probably supported by the predominance of visual elements in then. There are, nevertheless, textual traits such as if-constituents, a useful resource to introduce hypothesis (Carter-Thomas and Rowley-Jolivet 2008: 191-192), which are worth investigating, since they mirror the inductive reasoning path of scientific discourse.
This contribution, based on a corpus of 56 medical posters presented at international conferences, aims to investigate how conditionals are employed in the discourse of medical posters. In particula, it will try to determine the extent to which if-conditional constituents “involve processes of supposition and inference in which the protases function as premises and the apodoses as conclusions” (Ferguson 2001: 74); in addition, it will examine how conditionals express ‘facticity’ and ‘refocusing’ (Carter-Thomas/Rowley-Jolivet 2008) and whether the position of the apodosis and the protasis can mirror the scientists’ inductive reasoning path. The results suggest that, in this genre, language seems unnecessary, as the representation of facts is reported by visual data which seem to speak for themselves and whose interpretation is left to the viewer of the poster: the authors’ voice is just leading the way from one visual to another.