A Corpus-based Study Of Stance Markers In TED Speeches

Stance marker is a linguistic means of expressing personal views and attitudes.It is irreplaceable in text construction and interpersonal communication.TED is designed to express emotions and spread ideas.It becomes an important way for English learners to learn English.Studying stance markers in TED speeches can help speakers more effectively draw the attention of the audience,increase the credibility of the speech,improve the persuasion of the speech,and express personal emotions.This study takes the classification of stance markers,proposed by Hyland as the theoretical basis,and conducts qualitative and quantitative analyses on the stance markers used in TED speeches.The author built a TED speech corpus consisting of 304,455 words,covering five types of TED speeches.The author used AntConc to count the frequency of stance markers used in the five types of TED speeches and SPSS to check whether there is a significant difference between the use of stance markers in the five types of TED speeches.Finally,the specific usage of each category of stance markers in the five types of TED speeches were probed;the similarities of and differences between the use of stance markers in the five types of TED speeches were found out;possible causes of the differences were analyzed.The study found that stance markers are used most frequently in entertainment speeches and least frequently in technology speeches.In the five types of TED speeches,the frequency of self-mention markers is the highest,the greatest difference exists in the use of hedges.Speakers from different fields have different preference in the choices of specific words in hedges,boosters,attitude markers,and self-mention markers.The research will enrich the study of stance markers in spoken discourse.It also help speakers from all walks of life use stance markers to express their attitudes more effectively and make the presentation more attractive and persuasive.