A Study On The Interpersonal Meaning Of Engagement Markers In TED Educational Talks

TED talks can convey knowledge,ideas and thoughts in the fields of technology,education and entertainment,with TED educational talks being more persuasive.Speakers attach importance to interactive communication with the audience and the establishment of harmonious interpersonal relationships.Engagement markers,as interactional metadiscourse reflecting the interpersonal meaning of discourse,are linguistic devices that allow audiences to participate directly in communication.Speakers often make use of engagement markers as a means of interaction and communication with their audience during the speech.Previous research on engagement markers has focused on the field of academic writing,but relatively little research has been conducted on engagement markers in TED educational talks.This thesis,therefore,aims to examine the use of engagement markers and how they embody interpersonal meaning in TED educational talks.In this thesis,sixty speeches have been selected based on criteria ranging from 12 to 18 minutes in length,spanning the years 2016-2021,and on the theme of education.Based on the linguistic characteristics of the TED talks,this thesis adopts Hyland’s classification of engagement markers.Engagement markers in the speech scripts are annotated one by one through UAM Corpus tool 3.0 software.Finally,the frequency of engagement markers is obtained.The thesis focuses on answering the following two questions:(1)What are the features of the overall frequency distribution of engagement markers in TED educational talks?(2)How do speakers use engagement markers to realize interpersonal meaning in TED educational talks?The results show that the frequency of audience pronouns is the highest in the selected talks,followed by directives,questions,and appeals to shared knowledge.The frequency of asides is the lowest.It is reflected that audience pronouns and directives can explicitly make the audience aware of their participation in the discourse construction process.Therefore,they are the two most frequently used engagement markers.Besides,coherence is important to speeches,so personal asides occur less frequently.In addition,it is revealed that the inclusive first person pronouns can unite the audience,and second person pronouns can directly refer to the audience and enhance the audience’s sense of participation.Imperatives are mainly used to establish the authority of the speaker.The imperative verb imagine is used to provoke the audience to think;imperative verbs see and look at are used to direct the audiences’ attention.Among the obligation modals,speakers mainly use have to and should to express order,while the obligational modal must with a stronger voice is used less frequently.Capturing the audience’s attention and arousing their interest can be achieved by asking questions.The speaker tends to take the knowledge shared with the audience as the basis for the argument,which is mainly achieved through the words of course/obviously/typically/traditionally.In order to make the speech more friendly and understandable to the audience,the speaker uses personal asides to give explanations and comments.Apart from the theoretical meaning of enriching the analysis of engagement markers,the practical meaning of this thesis is to help speakers develop a better audience awareness and an understanding of the link between interpersonal relationships and engagement markers,as well as recognize that engagement markers can be used appropriately to achieve communication and interaction with the audience and to build harmonious interpersonal relationships.