A Study Of Proximity In TED Talks

Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) began as a conference in 1984. As a global nonprofit community, TED devotes itself to spreading ideas. Presenters who are invited to TED conferences are supposed to give short but powerful talks (18 minutes or less). Today TED talks cover almost all topics, ranging from science to business to global issues in more than 100 languages. Since 2006, these talks were uploaded to the Internet, the influence of which was expanded to the whole world. Since then many scholars became interested in TED talks.But existing studies on TED talks mainly focus on gaining inspiration from TED or applying TED model or talk materials into higher education. Little attention has been paid to what makes TED such a success. Given the fact that proximity contributes a lot to popular science, this research concentrates on the five aspects of Hyland’s proximity in TED talks, which are organization, argument structures, credibility, stance and engagement.This study is based on a self-built corpus, which is composed of 34 transcripts of the most-viewed TED talks on the official TED website. It is found that an opening to a speech is what a theme to a sentence, the organization of which is of great importance. Direct introduction, introduction to background knowledge, share of personal stories and interaction with questions are the top four opening types in the corpus. As for argument structures, rhetorical devices, linguistic devices and visuals are employed by TED speakers to explain their ideas. Credibility promotes proximity in speakers’first-hand stories and quotes from authoritative insiders to support speakers’ present talk. Then in terms of stance, various attitude markers and few hedges are employed by speakers to show their stance, though sometimes they represent the attitudes to audience rather than to facts or ideas. Finally, engagement establishes proximity with the assistance of inclusive pronouns and interactive questions.It is concluded that TED’s success of spreading ideas owes to all the five aspects of proximity. Therefore, in further knowledge dissemination, attention should first be paid to the organization and structure of speeches, catering for and appealing to audience as much as possible. Then difficult concepts are better to be explained in simple, plain language using various rhetorical and linguistic devices. Finally, it is essential to interact with audience and engage them in the process of knowledge dissemination.