A Study On Interpersonal Meaning In TED Inspirational Speeches

Nowadays, more and more communication network platforms have emerged in this informational society. TED (Techology, Entertainment and design) is one of the groundbreaking speech platforms which are gaining a worldwide popularity. According to its founder, TED’s aim is "ideas worth spreading", and its purpose is to change the world through the power of thought. Since founded in 1984, it has been working on inviting the world’s thought leaders and doers to share with the audience their advanced ideas in their beloved fields. Within 18 minutes, TED speakers try to use language to express their attitudes and to influence the audience’s attitudes and behaviors, which just corresponds to Halliday’s interpersonal meaning (IM) of systemic functional grammar theory. According to Halliday, language has three meta-functions-ideational meta-function, interpersonal meta-function and textual meta-function. Interpersonal meaning comes from the interpersonal meta-function. It means people use language to establish and maintain their relationship with other people and meanwhile to indicate their roles in communication.In order to understand the cause of TED’s profound influence and to explore the IM in TED speeches, this research adopts qualitative analysis method to study the top 10 popular inspirational speech transcriptions from 3 aspects:mood, modality and personal pronoun. The research questions are (1) what linguistic features TED inspirational speeches have; (2) what roles these features play in realizing IM.The research results are as follows:first, in mood system, TED inspirational speakers tend to use a large number of declaratives to express statements, emotions and suggestions. They usually use declaratives to tell stories or describe experiences, which create a relaxing atmosphere. Interrogatives are second frequently used. Speakers ask questions to attract the audience’s attention and get them involved. Meanwhile, speakers can have a better control of the speech. The least frequently used mood is the imperative mood, the reason of which may be that speakers tend to be polite and euphemistic when they express appeal and command. Second, in modality system, modal verb operators and modal adjuncts are considered. The author finds that median value verb operators are most frequently used, followed by low value verb operators, and high value verb operators. Speakers tend to spread their opinions in a polite and reserved way by choosing appropriate modal expressions. Third, in person system, TED inspirational speakers use many first persons, then second persons, and least third persons. In this way, speakers attract the audience’s interest and shorten the distance between them, which contributes to the realization of the interpersonal meaning. To sum up, mood, modality and personal pronoun manage to realize the interpersonal meaning in TED inspirational speeches.The significance of this research is threefold. In the first place, this research applies interpersonal meaning theory in real discourse and broadens the application field of the theory. In the second place, detailed analysis on realization devices of interpersonal meaning makes it easier for people to comprehend the cause of profound influence made by inspirational speeches. Last, this research sheds light on people who are interested in inspirational speeches by providing valuable experience and useful skills.