Professional Discourse in Video Abstracts: Rearticulating the Meaning of Written Research Article Abstracts

The online practice of creating authored video abstracts to supplement written research article (RA) abstracts allows medical journals and their authors to gain major promotional advantages. This emerging practice is, however, pushing professional discourse towards an unprecedented digital intersemiotic shift, which may lead to a significant diachronic variation in the RA abstract genre and eventually affect expert-to-expert communication. The present paper investigates how moves/steps in written RA abstracts are rendered in video abstracts and how the RA abstract genre is meaningfully re-articulated at the multimodal level of discourse. Move and multimodal analyses are performed on a corpus of written and video abstracts selected from online medical journals overtly promoting this discourse practice. Results show that new constituent steps in video abstracts are key to greater genre flexibility and that their linguistic realisations point to genre variation. Multimodal findings highlight different intersemiotic relations between the two abstract modes, and further findings reveal that the traditional RA abstract genre is contaminated by other professional speech genres, which strengthen the spoken mode of abstracts.