The rhetoric of conference presentation introductions : context, argument and interaction

International audienceThis study focuses on the introduction section in a spoken research genre, the scientific conference presentation (CP). The aim is to investigate how the specific communicative context of the genre impacts on the argumentative structure and interpersonal strategies adopted by speakers to address their live audience. Through a move analysis of the introductions, we show that their rhetorical structure is markedly different from that of the research article, and relate the move categories identified to the contextual and epistemological characteristics of the genre. A generic move model for the CP introduction is proposed. The second rhetorical aspect addressed concerns the interpersonal relations set up by the allocation of speaker and addressee roles through the use of personal pronouns. By a contrastive analysis of CP introductions and those of the corresponding proceedings articles, we show how speakers facilitate information processing for the audience and also involve them in the research process. The data comprise video recordings of 44 conference presentations from 3 scientific fields (geology, medicine, and physics) and a smaller corpus of 13 articles from the conference proceedings in physic