Research questions, corpus description, and methodology

The aim of the present book is the analysis of the texts described in Section 1.3, i.e., the layperson summaries of clinical trials. While other text types belonging to expert-lay communication in the medical field, like package leaflets, brochures, and informed consents have been frequently examined, both from a linguistic and translational perspective (cf. for instance Mentrup 1982; Eckkrammer 1998; Lyba 2001; Rovere 2001; Müller 2009; Leunikava 2011; Puato 2012; Giumelli 2013; Orletti & Iovino 2018), no such studies on the layperson summaries exist to date, due to their recent introduction. The author of the present book has already published a few brief articles on the topic (Pedrini 2022a, 2022b, 2023): two of them concern verb voice in a small corpus, one the contrastive analysis of two layperson summaries. Their content has been partially re-elaborated in the present book, and their analyses are referred to in a few cases in order to compare their findings to the results of the current analysis. The layperson summaries are particularly interesting not only due to their innovativeness, but also in light of the fact that they should be written in Plain Language and that they are the only ones of their kind with specific recommendations.