An Analysis Of Interpersonal Functions Of TED Business Speeches

TED(Technology,Entertainment,Design)business speakers make every effort to make influences on listeners by sharing their amazing ideas and special experiences through the handling of words so as to achieving interpersonal functions,aiming to connect with listeners and lead them to make changes in attitudes or behaviors.Strengthening interpersonal relationships and increasing influences on listeners comes to be the business speakers' tirelessly pursuit as well as one of research focuses.Based on the Interpersonal Function of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,this study selects 25 TED business speeches as research data and endeavors to analyze the realization of interpersonal functions through mood,modality,and personal pronoun respectively with the help of relevant statistics and qualitative analysis.Here follows the findings:In aspect of mood,TED business speakers mostly share their experiences and ideas in declarative mood.They send messages directly to the audiences so that they can catch the points and keep up with the speakers.Interrogative mood serves as thinking lead or emotional catalyst to active the audiences to speak and listen to their inner voices.They may turn to euphemism for help rather than employ imperative mood to imply their intentions.This show their respects and politeness,and helps maintain equal and friendly relationships.Modality system carries the judgments of speakers about the reliability and authenticity of the mentioned information,which may influence,alone or in combination,the audiences'mindsets and attitudes.TED business talkers prefer median and low value verb operators to high value ones to ensure the objectiveness of their expressions and to hold certain reservations.Modal adjuncts help strengthen or weaken moods and indicate speakers' opinions on certain statements.Thus TED business speakers can persuade the audiences to join them in the same side.Concerning personal pronoun,TED business speakers use the first-person to narrate their experiences and stories to make listeners believe what they say and build mutual trust.They resort to the second-person to attention the audiences and bring them to certain contexts.It creates face-to-face communication effects and pulls the two closer,which makes both deliver and receive messages easier.The third-person appears,rarely,to provide additional information about the third party so as to enrich the speech contents or better exemplify the arguments.In general,mood,modality and person system functions independently or interdependently to serve their mutual mission of helping the TED business speakers to better achieve interpersonal functions in delivering speeches.This research is of great reference value to the present and potential(TED,business,or general)public speech fans to learn and improve their public speaking skills and manage interpersonal functions in future communication.Time,energy and competence limitations make enough room for this research to be improved.The future researchers can make some complementary and extensional attempts.