“É importante que não tome mais comprimidos do que lhe foi indicado”: estratégias linguísticas de desresponsabilização da indústria farmacêutica em folhetos informativos

Abstract

Legally, pharmaceutical companies are responsible for any damage, injury or harm caused to the user by their products. However, the language present in product warnings (Dumas, 1990; Shuy, 1990; Tiersma, 2002) and in patient information leaflets (PIL) (van der Waarde, 2008; Hagemeyer & Coulthard, 2017) seem to protect manufacturers from possible litigation, transferring responsibility to the consumer or user. Therefore, using both a pragmatic and discoursive analysis approach, we aim to investigate which linguistic strategies in European Portuguese (EP) acquit pharmaceutical companies from holding liability for the users’ actions. The qualitative analysis of a corpus of 20 PIL in EP reveals that the use of passive voice, impersonal constructions, attenuation of directive acts, declarative sentences with imperative value and vague language represent intentional strategies for pharmaceutical companies to protect themselves from possible litigation. Additionally, the comprehensibility of the text is further compromised by grammatical inconsistencies, the constant calculation of inferences and the presence of technical terms, “medicalese”.