“We want you to be informed”: Rhetorical and pragmatic strategies for recontextualising scientific knowledge in biology video abstracts

This paper adopts a multimodal discourse analysis approach to explore the recontextualisation of scientific information facilitated by multimodal affordances in the remediated genre of the video abstract. It focuses on rhetorical and pragmatic strategies realised by metadiscourse resources enhancing audience engagement and tailoring scientific content to the consensual knowledge of the non-expert audience. Despite the recent interest in the study of recontextualisation in multimodal scientific genres, a relationship between the rhetoric, pragmatics and metadiscourse dimensions involved in the recontextualisation of expert knowledge in digital academic genres has not been established. This study undertakes to fill this gap by analysing relationships in a set of rhetorical and pragmatic strategies and metadiscourse resources involved in the recontextualisation of scientific content in Current Biology video abstracts. The investigation is carried out on a corpus of 20 video abstracts in the field of biology published online on the website of the journal Current Biology (Cell Press) in the period 2020–2023. The study contributes to our understanding of recontextualisation of specialised knowledge by exploring the adaptation and repragmatisation of verbal and non-verbal resources and proposing a typology of biology video abstracts based on the identified strategies.