El prospecto de medicamento en España y en Italia

THE PATIENT INFORMATION LEAFLET IN SPAIN AND IN ITALY. In this article we intend to focus on some aspects of the popularization of science, through the instruments of genre analysis, which enables the study of the text in its relationship with the social reality. We investigate the information leaflet from an Italian-Spanish contrastive point of view. The information leaflet is a genre of the popularization of science, addressed to the patient with an informative and directive function; its writing is regulated by the European and national legislation. The existing studies on these documents point out its scarce legibility owing to the excess of technicisms; the analysis of our corpus, that includes 40 Spanish texts and 40 Italian ones, reveals an evolution of the genre towards forms more open to communication, although not always effective. These changes affect both languages, but with some differences: Italian prefers impersonal structures while Spanish appear more user-oriented and thus more communicative.