An Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of TED Entertainment Speeches

TED is the acronym for Technology,Entertainment and Design with “Ideas worth spreading” as its purpose.It invites thought leaders and action elites from all walks of life in the world to share with the audience what they are most passionate about and their advanced ideas.TED speakers influence the audience by sharing their thoughts and attitudes through language,which is consistent with halliday's definition of the interpersonal function of language.According to Halliday(2000),a variety of language's functions can be further divided into three meta-functions,which are ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.The interpersonal function serves to establish and maintain the social connection with others,which reflects the participants' role playing in a conversation or an interaction(Halliday,2002).Halliday(2009)also indicated that mood,modality can be regarded as a reflection of the interpersonal meaning,which then was added by Halliday with more ways of reflections,including pronoun system,attitudinal modifier and prosodic characteristics of words.Currently,a lot of researches on interpersonal meaning are mainly based on political discourse,celebrity speeches or graduation speeches.However,few people analyze the TED entertainment speech.Therefore,the author selected 26 entertainment speeches from 2014 to2018 as the research corpus based on the thematic classification on the official TED website to study the realization of the interpersonal meaning of the TED entertainment speeches.This thesis adopts AntConc 3.5.7 to conduct a quantitative analysis of the corpus,and Halliday's interpersonal function is combined to conduct a qualitative analysis of 26 TED entertainment speeches in terms of mood,modality and personal pronoun system.There are two specific research questions in the study.1.What are the linguistic features of TED entertainment speeches in terms of distribution of mood,modality and personal pronouns in these speeches? 2.How is the interpersonal meaning of these TED entertainment speeches achieved through such distribution?The research findings are as follows: First,in terms of mood system,the declarativemood accounts for almost ninety percent of all moods.The speaker will choose more declarative mood to express thoughts,feelings and directly provide some other information,even express suggestions to the audiences sometimes.The interrogative mood occupied8.66%,and it can make the audiences active,draw their attention,and stimulate their interests and curiosity.The imperative mood was used to show their appeals,requests,suggestions,guidance to the audiences,but the imperative mood is least used,accounting for 1.81 %,because the speaker prefers to choose a euphemism to show respect.Second,in the modality system,TED entertainment speaker tends to use the median and low value modal verb operators rather than the high value ones.The proportion of low value modal verbs was48.95%,almost half of them.Median modal verbs came in second,accounting for 32.17%.The least used modal verbs were high-valued modal verbs(18.88%).This is an effective way to avoid overconfidence in their findings and those of their fields.Modal adjuncts reflect the judgment of the speaker and affect the effectiveness of the speaker's tone or utterance.The modal verb operators and the modal adjuncts sometimes work together to achieve the interpersonal meaning.Third,in the personal pronoun system,the first person pronoun accounted for 49.12%,followed by the third person pronoun,which accounted for 32.79%of the three categories of personal pronouns.The second person pronoun is least used,which accounted for 18.09%.The speakers often use the first person pronoun more to express their ideas,share their life experiences,and tell their stories,almost accounting for a half of the three types of personal pronouns.They use the second person pronoun to guide the listeners to think and participate,communicate and show their friendliness,thus making the distance between the two sides get closer.Third person pronouns are used more often than second person pronouns because they use third person pronouns when they cite third party experiences or ideas to enrich their statements or strengthen their arguments,which also strengthens the connection with the audience.The research significance of this thesis is mainly reflected in two aspects.First of all,the study applies interpersonal function theory to real discourse,thus the application of this theory was enriched.As interpersonal function is a main part of Systemic-Functional Grammar,it is used to express the speaker's attitude,identity,status,intention as well as hisor her inference,judgment and evaluation of things and other functions.Therefore,by analyzing the interpersonal meaning of TED entertainment speeches,this thesis can clearly reveal the attitudes and positions of the speakers.Secondly,the research will provide valuable experience and practical skills for those who are keen on public speaking and entertainment speaking,and have certain guiding significance.