Construction Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Multimodal Discourse In Technical TED Speeches

TED enjoys worldwide popularity owing to high-quality speeches,which has attracted the attention and research of scholars.However,the current academic achievements are mainly concentrated on the fields of rhetoric,translatology,pedagogy and so on.In fields of linguistics,relevant research is relatively limited,especially from the perspective of MDA.This thesis attempts to elucidate two central questions: First,how are interpersonal meaning and interactive meaning constructed in technical TED speech videos? Second,what is the relationship between different modes in technical TED speech videos? This study chooses five technical speeches that were delivered in 2019 on TED official website as the research data and adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze data.And then the application of MDA theory on technical TED speech videos from the perspective of interpersonal meaning of SFL and interactive meaning of VG is discussed.And the author tentatively revises a framework model for the present study based on Zhang Delu’s synthetic theoretical framework.With the help of Ant Conc and ELAN,verbal modes and visual modes are retrieved and annotated respectively.Based on the exported data,the distribution features of these modes are first analyzed,and then the author further expounds these modes to construct interpersonal meaning and interactive meaning in technical TED speech videos.The findings are as follows: Firstly,in terms of interpersonal meaning,the declarative mood accounts for the largest proportion in the mood system,which is often used to provide the information.The interrogative mood is utilized to draw the audiences’ attention.In modality,the low value of modality is frequently harnessed and high value of modality is the least commonly adopted.In the personal pronoun system,the first and third persons occupy the very huge proportions.Secondly,in the case of interactive meaning,in terms of contact,the usage of offer is significantly higher than demand,indicating that the speakers mainly provide the information to viewers during the technical TED speech.When it comes to social distance,the close shot is the most frequently used to bring the speakers and viewers closer,while the long shot is the second most commonly adopted to highlight the speaker’s authority.In terms of perspective,horizontally,the frontal angle is often harnessed to reflect that speaker and audiences are involved.Vertically,the low angle is mainly utilized to emphasize the speaker’s expertise and authority in certain field,and then the eye-level angle is capitalized to show the equal relation between the speakers and the viewers.Thirdly,verbal mode is mainly used for communication in speech.The visual mode is used not only to realize an interactive meaning,but also as an additional symbol to make the expression more concrete and vivid.In this study,relationships between modes are mainly divided into complementary and non-complementary relation.Owing to the scope of this thesis and author’s capabilities,there are many limitations in this study.In addition,the limited data fails to give a more objective research results.Therefore,it will be more convincing to expand the data.