The Uses Of Organization-Oriented Elements In TED Talks From The Perspective Of Linear Unit Grammar

Nowadays,TED(Technology,Entertainment and Design)has become one of the most famous public speech platforms which are enjoying great popularity and very high clicks.It aims at spreading ideas,usually in the form of short and powerful talks.At present,many scholars have studied TED Talks from multiple perspectives,such as pedagogy,creative thinking and pragmatics.However,few scholars have studied the uses of the organization-oriented elements(O elements for short)from Linear Unit Grammar(LUG for short)perspective,leaving the thesis much room for research.Based on Sinclair & Mauranen's(2006)model,the O elements are concerned with managing the discourse,which can be divided into text-oriented organizational elements(OT elements for short)and interactive-oriented organizational elements(OI element for short).According to the Linear Unit Grammar,OT elements are concerned with text,to organize the discourse as text;while OI elements are concerned with interaction,to manage the shifting situations----framing and focusing moves,controlling timing,holding and yielding the floor.This thesis selects 60 TED talks as a corpus,consisting of 20 TED speeches from three topics: Technology,Entertainment and Design.Through qualitative and quantitative methods,this thesis analyzes the uses of O elements in TED Talks in terms of distributions,lexical-grammatical realizations and discourse functions.The findings reveal that the frequency of OT elements is about four times that of OI elements.High frequency of the emergence of OT elements indicates the preparatory nature of the TED speakers and the formality of the speech.What's more,the lexical-grammatical categories of the OI elements are more diversified than that of OT elements.OT elements embody more of their internal commonalities,while OI elements exhibit greater diversities.In addition,from the perspective of discourse functions of O elements,OT elements in TED Talks are responsible for connecting the words,phrases and clauses to make the speech inherently logical and coherentlyconsistent;while OI elements focus on the interaction with the audience and controlling timing.The analysis of O elements in TED Talks may shed some new light on English language teaching and learning.Meanwhile,the results of this thesis are expected to help English learners improve their English expression.Finally,the thesis also expects to help those interested in becoming powerful speakers to deliver speeches successfully.