A Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In Native And Non-native English Public Speeches

Speech is a language-based social activity that takes place under certain circumstances with the help of linguistic and body language and aims to convey information and thoughts to the public.TED is a platform which collected the speeches of speakers in different fields these years.Nowadays it is a well-known website for sharing ideas,and it is also a platform that has expanded its spiritual mind.As an integral component of the internal structure of discourse,cohesion has an important role in discourse coherence.Cohesion in English published by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 has caused scholars to pay close attention to the cohesion and cohesion of discourse.However,few studies have analyzed the cohesion and coherence patterns of public speeches.Based on the theory of cohesion,this article analyzes how TED speakers create coherent and effective presentations with various cohesive devices through quantitative and qualitative approaches.This paper took altogether 20 English public speeches from TED delivered by both English native speakers and non-native speakers from different countries as research subjects for analysis.The following two questions are about to be answered:1.What is the general distribution of various cohesive devices in selected English speech texts? 2.What are the differences in the use of cohesive devices between native speakers and non-native speakers? 3.What is the proper explanation for the differences between the two groups?Through quantitative and qualitative analysis to the research sources,this paper came to the following conclusions:1.First,references are the most frequently used cohesive devices in the English public speeches selected in this paper.Secondly,the use of lexical replication and collocation is also very common in English public speeches.On the contrary,thefrequency of conjunctions is relatively low,and substitution and ellipsis are the least used cohesive devices in selected English public speeches.2.In the use of reference,non-native speakers tend to use first and second person references more frequently than native speakers,and use less demonstrative reference than the natives.And non-native speakers use more particular comparisons of compared to the native speakers in the employment of comparative reference.The use of substitution and ellipsis are both less frequent in the two groups of speech discourse,but overall native speakers are more frequent and fluent in the use of substitution and ellipsis.As to conjunctions and lexical cohesion,native speakers and non-native speakers tend to adopt those in a similar frequency.3.The differences in the use of cohesive devices in English public speeches given by native speakers and non-native speakers mainly lie in their familiarity of the language.The current study reveals the general situation and differences in the use of cohesive devices by native speakers of English and non-native speakers in English public speeches form TED talks.The analysis of cohesive devices is very useful for understanding and constructing coherent oral and written discourse.It is hoped that the study can provide some useful implications for non-native speakers to learn English speaking.