Oralising text slides in scientific conference presentations

This chapter aims to help researchers bridge the gap between the written and oral presentation of their work by providing a corpus-based analysis of the respective functions and linguistic features of text slides and the accompanying spoken commentary in scientific presentations. Drawing on several hours of videofilmed presentations at international conferences, the corpus comprises all the text slides in the data, and the speaker’s commentary given at these points in the talks. The commentary and the projected text form two synchronous parallel discourses, with similar field content, but markedly different linguistic realizations and roles. The comparison between the written and spoken subsets is conducted in the framework of systemic functional linguistics, focusing on grammatical metaphor and the three metafunctions. Keywords: scientific conference presentations; multimodal corpus; spoken and written science; grammatical metaphor; metafunctions