The Voicing Values Of Reported Speech In TED Speeches

The 21 st century is an era of information, and the convenience of the Internet makes itself one of the most important channels for information dissemination apart from the abundant sources it provides. Nowadays, one groundbreaking speech-TED(technology, entertainment and design) is gaining great popularity and the TED speeches are those delivered by great minds and men of action from all around the world by means of telling stories within 18 minutes. In terms of TED’s huge influence on the Internet, it’s chosen to be the research background. Due to many factors in this kind of speech, we select the reported speech to be the research objects. The reason is that a large number of previous studies only focus on the grammatical differences between direct speech and indirect speech.In order to better appreciate the linguistic art of the reported speech in TED speeches, this thesis will make a tentative analysis of twenty popular TED public speeches from the perspective of Engagement within Appraisal theory. The presenters of TED want to share experience about their beloved careers and aim to change the world with inspiring ideas, which matches the core concept of Engagement. With respect to the theoretical framework, we consider quoting as a strategy of the writer not only to convey information but also to give an orientation to the text by means of the choices made in the linguistic constituents of the quoting procedure. How the readers are encouraged to align with other voices and values in the text in order to share the appreciation of the relevance or significance of the writer’s own attitude is via the writer’s voice. Here I draw on the notion of Engagement within Appraisal theory, reconfiguring this network to investigate the degrees of alignment or disalignment with the voices and values in the text. An approach to mapping systematically the dynamic process of positioning in texts by which the writers aim to align readers with their own attitude is offered by the network. A proposed model for the present study will be put forward and each will be analyzed with examples in detail. Finally the construction of the writerreader interaction will be summed up and it can give a deep insight into how the presenters makeutmost use of the tactics to align with their audience. After analyzing, it can be concluded that both the dialogic expansion resources and the dialogic contraction resources are used to construct the writer-reader relationship. Besides, the former is less than the latter because the speakers want to gain more opportunity to present their authority and truthfulness to the audience.