A Study On The Interpersonal Meaning In TED Public Speeches

Nowadays, one groundbreaking speech--TED (technology, entertainment anddesign) is gaining great popularity. As is said by the website founder of TED in China,“The foresight of TED public speeches ranks the highest almost among all domesticspeeches. The most innovative science and technology as well as thinking trends canbe detected on the stage of TED. It will bring you good thoughts just by way of tellingstories within18minutes, which is enough to open a new world for you.” TEDspeakers use the language to express him or her, to express his or her attitudes and toinfluence other people’s attitudes or behaviors, which is very corresponding toHalliday’s theory of interpersonal meaning (IM). From the perspective of linguistics,the speech consists of not only abundant information, but also a great deal of IM fora specific purpose.According to Halliday, IM plays the part of setting up social relations andmaintaining them, as well as indicating the roles of the participants in communication.The links between the system of language and the speakers’ choices in thecommunication enable us to see that the speakers are trying to construct meaningabout their interpersonal relationships, such as the extent of their intimacy, level offamiliarity with each other, and their attitudes and judgments. In order to betterappreciate the linguistic art of TED public speeches, this thesis makes a tentativeanalysis into twenty popular TED public speeches from the perspective of systemicfunctional grammar (SFG) in terms of mood, modality and personal pronoun systems.In mood analysis, it is found that declarative mood takes the largest proportionand the speakers usually adopt declarative mood to function as information-giving,suggestions-expressing as well as action-commanding. The speakers tend to state theirlife experiences and their creativity at work. Despite the fact that there is no real“dialogue” between the speaker and audience, the declarative mood plays the role of“dialogues” and thus a conversation tone is established. Interrogative mood ranks thesecond, the use of which make listeners focus on the missing part of the speeches orurge them to confirm messages. Therefore, listeners can be assigned with the role of“speakers”, too, and TED speakers might easily control the topic. Through the changeof identity or roles, listeners get involved into the speeches. As to imperative mood, itis mainly used to command. Since speakers may have somewhat superior status on thestage, they can adopt imperative mood to advocate or command. However, it ranks the least, which may concern the principle of politeness. Modality analysis is made tovalue of modal verb operators and modal adjuncts. The thesis finds that TED publicspeakers prefer large amount of low and median value modal verb operators. It isfound that speakers prefer appropriate linguistic forms to show their attitude, ideas.Besides, they tend to hold certain reservation about what they have conveyed in orderto make their speeches accurate and scientific. In personal pronoun analysis,“I” and“we” are frequently used to display their respective achievements, which also helpprove the validity of mood structure findings. Second personal pronouns are oftenused to guide listeners into certain cultural or linguistic contexts. The adoption of“you” is to draw the attention of the audience in order to maintain face-to-facecommunication. Third personal pronoun is more frequently used in TED than secondone. This may reveal the fact that speakers intend to make use of their life experienceor imaginary context to expose their findings and share their aspirations to strengthenthe affiliation with listeners.Mood, modality, and personal pronouns are important devices of realizing IM inTED to express speakers’ views, influence the listeners and establish and maintainrelationships with them.