Self-Promotion In Public Speech

As an individual’s activity in social communication,self-promotion ability is the fundamental ability that an individual should have.Self-promotion in public speech refers to the process in which a speaker makes his personality characteristics,personal feelings and personal point of view understood or accepted by the audience through his efforts.The success of a speech actually depends on whether the speaker promotes himself successfully.Scholars at home and abroad have attached more importance to the study of self-promotion from the perspectives of metalanguage and critical genre analysis,with studies from the perspective of appraisal theory being relatively inadequate.Based on the interpersonal function of systemic functional linguistics,appraisal theory explores the words used in discourse from three dimensions of attitude,engagement and graduation,revealing speakers’ attitudes in communications.Based on the generic structure and Martin’s appraisal theory,this study takes self-promotion in speeches as the research object and collects 20 most-viewed speeches on the Ted website as the research texts to analyze the generic structure,appraisal resources and self-promotion.This study first analyzes the generic structure of the speech and finds that the generic structure of Ted Talks mainly contains six moves,including opening remarks,revealing topic of the speech,opening the speech,presenting the speech,concluding the speech,and expressing appreciation.Secondly,this study explains the use and distribution of different appraisal resources in each move and step of Ted Talks.Engagement resources are the most frequently used among all the appraisal resources,followed by attitude resources,and graduation resources are the least frequently used;in terms of move and step,in general,the appraisal resources are employed in Ted move steps from highest to lowest is move 4,move 3,move 5 and move 2.Finally,from the perspective of self-promotion,the speaker employs relevant appraisal resources to promote his personality image,personal feelings and personal point of view.Through an appraisal analysis of self-promotion in Ted Talks,this study provides a new idea for the research of public speech and widens the research scope of public speech with the combination of appraisal theory and generic structure analysis.On the other hand,by exploring the distribution of appraisal resources in speech,it strengthens the public’s understanding of Ted speakers’ point of view,which can provide valuable references for constructing efficient public speeches and help people learn valuable language expression skills with a view to providing some references for future public speeches and how to conduct self-promotion,having certain academic value and practical significance.