Multi-Dimensional Exploratory Factor Analysis of TED Talks

Facta Universitatis Series: Linguistics and Literature, 2015

This paper investigates the importance of credibility in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks, which are popularising speeches aiming at Knowledge Dissemination. Drawing upon Gili’s (2013) theory on credibility, which grounds credibility on the three roots of knowledge, affectivity, and shared values, this work analyses how credibility is established in this new tool of popularisation that breaches the typical ‘scientist-mediator-audience’ triangularisation, bringing scientists directly into contact with their audiences. Through the analysis of the use of personal stories and anecdotes, familiar language, visuals, exemplifications, and reference to everyday life, this study shows how these techniques are used by TED speakers to establish on-the-spot trustworthiness by appealing to emotions and values, revealing that in this genre of popularisation, credibility is achieved more through trustworthiness and similarity, connected to Gili’s normative and affective roots of credi...

This study explores the web-mediated genre of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks, speech events whereby experts in their field disseminate knowledge from different domains (e.g. science, technology, design, global issues) addressing an audience of both co-present participants and web-users all over the world. The aim of this study is to investigate the way academics convey epistemic stance (Conrad, Biber 2000) and build up their image as experts on the TED stage. To this purpose, a contrastive analysis was carried out comparing two corpora of spoken discourse, i.e. a corpus of TED talks and a corpus of MICASE university lectures from different disciplines. Although in both genres the speaker is an academic, both the communicative purpose and audience expectations differ substantially in the two contexts under scrutiny. This comparison highlights some distinguishing traits of TED talks and provides a better insight into this genre. Adopting a corpus-based approach, attention is first paid to the most recurrent epistemic lexical verbs (ELVs) and to the use of first and second person pronouns in the two corpora. The qualitative analysis then focuses on similarities and differences in the discourse functions of the four most frequent ELVs (see, show, know, think) and of their clusters when they combine with first and second person pronouns in the two corpora. Previous studies in the field of English for Academic Purposes (Rounds 1987; Fortanet 2004; Walsh 2004; Artiga León 2006; Bamford 2009) are referred to as a starting point to investigate a novel, unexplored pragmatic space (i.e. that of TED) wherein academics accomplish purposes other than merely disseminating knowledge and training students, such as promoting their research and building up their image as experts

2019

TEDsters often employ multimedia resources, such as images, photographs, or short video clips, which can help improve comprehension and avoid misunderstanding. Multimodal strategies in these genres also include gesturing, especially used to reinforce the meanings of abstract notions (metaphoric-referential), or to increase interpersonal engagement (deictic-social), thus helping reduce the asymmetry between expert speakers and a non-expert audience (Masi 2016). Furthermore, TED Talks share some features with other web-mediated forms of communication, such as science blogs (Garzone 2012), social networking sites (Mattiello 2017b), or Google Talks (Mattiello forth.). 1 For instance, in both science blogs and TED Talks, there is a reduced technicality in content and vocabulary. In these web genres, the language is simplified, accessible to a wide audience, and sector-specific terms are only given occasionally. In addition, in both TED and Google Talks, the tone adopted is often humorous (Scotto di Carlo 2013; Mattiello 2017a, forth.). Humour may indeed derive from a pleasant psychological shift of incongruity or contrast, from a sense of superiority or derision, but, above all, from a release reaction, i.e. when laughter is used to release tensions deriving from taboo or serious topics, such as economic crises, diseases, or political problems. By contrast, a feature that typically characterizes TED Talks is the use of axiological (fully subjective) adjectives, such as amazing or remarkable (Scotto di Carlo 2015). Experts use evaluative and emotive adjectives as a means to convey judgements and personal positions and to engage with the audience. In particular, TED speakers seem to express positive evaluations, especially aesthetic appreciation and emotive reactions. According to Scotto di Carlo (2015: 214), "these aesthetic and emotive adjectives are crucial in knowledge dissemination, as they appeal to the audience's sense of identity, self-interest, and emotions". Another characterizing feature of the TED Talks genre is the use of narration (Mattiello 2017a). By introducing specialized topics via personal narratives and anecdotes, TED speakers create a concrete scenario that can, on the one hand, facilitate the interlocutor's comprehension and, on the other, appeal to emotions and feelings. This favours the direct involvement of the audience and inspires discussion both with primary (co-present) recipients and with secondary 1 Google Talks consist of a series of presentations by invited speakers given at various Google offices throughout the world and available on the website Talks at Google (https://talksat.withgoogle.com/). They are generally longer than TED Talks, delivered by famous experts or celebrities in various fields, and often include dialogic (Q&A) parts, with a moderator who mediates between the speaker and the audience.

2017

Tato bakalářská práce se zaměřuje na problematiku jazyka zvolených TED Talks z oblasti lingvistiky a byznysu a přednes vybraných řečníků. Práce je rozdělena na teoretickou a praktickou část. Teoretická část obsahuje stručný přehled o společnosti TED, TED Talks, dále popisuje řečnický styl, nejdůležitější body přednesu prezentace a aspekty neverbální komunikace. Praktická část se věnuje analýze zvolených TED Talks, konkrétně analýze jazyka a přednesu. V závěru práce jsou specifikovány zjištěné výsledky.

The present study examines the rhetorical structure of talks from TED conferences to explore the possibility of their being incorporated into the instruction of oral presentation in English-language classrooms. Drawing on the corpus-based move analysis approach, the study analyzes a corpus of 58 selected TED talks to tease out their shared structural features and the variations and flexibility embedded among them. The analysis proceeds by using a coding protocol, developed for this corpus by the researchers, to outline the rhetorical moves and structural elements. The analysis identifies seven major move types (and their respective component steps) and establishes a genre prototype based on move frequencies, lengths, associations, and patterns of occurrence. Meanwhile, the findings also highlight the influence of the form, objectives, and conventions of TED conferences on the rhetorical structure of the talks. This paper discusses the pedagogical applications of the findings in classroom instruction as well as other implications for future research.

Iberica Revista De La Asociacion Europea De Lenguas Para Fines Especificos, 2015

This paper analyses "stance" in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks, which are popularising speeches aiming at knowledge dissemination. Based on a corpus of the TED talks presented between 2006 and 2012, this study focuses on how the speakers express judgments and take up positions through subjective adjectives. Drawing upon Kerbat-Orecchioni (1980) and Felices Lago's (1997) adjective classifications, the quantitative and qualitative study attempts to analyse the use of axiological evaluative adjectives, which are fully subjective, as they imply a qualitative evaluation adding a judgement to the modified noun. It has been noticed that TEDsters use vivid, descriptive subjective adjectives to establish a connection with the audience, which perceives a sense of similarity with the speaker. Like traditional scientific presentations, TED talks use adjectives conveying the relevance of their findings, while they distinguish themselves for the role given to aesthetic and emotional adjectives, practicality and veracity, also including the moral, political, and economic aspects involved in science. The work suggests that maybe TEDsters' approach to science might possibly contribute to breach the expert/non expert barrier, considering science not as something distant, but as a human experience for both laypersons and professionals.

Contrastive Pragmatics

This paper contributes to the question of how discourse relations are realised in TED talks. Drawing on an annotated, multilingual discourse corpus of TED talk transcripts, we examine discourse relations in English and Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish translations by concentrating on three aspects: the degree of explicitness in discourse relations, the extent to which explicit and implicit relations are encoded inter- or intra-sententially, and whether top-level discourse relation senses employed in English differ in the target languages. The study shows that while the target languages differ from English in the first two dimensions, they do not display considerable differences in the third dimension. The paper thus reveals variations in the realisation of discourse relations in translated transcripts of a spoken genre in three languages and offers some methodological insights for dealing with the issues surrounding discourse relations.

2018

Media discourse exhibits a variety of features which are similar to everyday conversations, on one hand, and more institutional forms of verbal interaction on the other. In investigating media interaction, we can observe how media communication affects the attitudes and opinions of society through the way it presents people and issues. Therefore, there is a need to look at why certain utterances occur in speech and to analyze why participants in media discourse have certain preferences for producing such utterances. The aim of the study is to analyze how Malaysian speakers of English engage in exchanges of speech in media talk when expressing opinions, and to investigate the strategies of expressing agreement or disagreement to the topic under discussion. The theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA) (Sacks, 1992) on recorded talk in natural settings of social interaction, as well as the application of CA to the study of talk in media setting (Hutchby, 2006) are adopted for the study. These two approaches are relevant in investigating how speakers engage in exchanges of speech or turn-taking in the ongoing interaction, in relation to agreement and disagreement sequences and strategies, as well as in exploring the linguistic aspects of media talk.

Mağallaẗ Al-Baḥṯ Al-ʿilmī Fī Al-Āadab, 2022

Since 1984 thousands of stories have been told on stage in the platform known as TEDEX or TED TALKS. These were inspiring stories covering diverse areas of life and meant to persuade the audience of better well-being. The present paper investigates the powerful persuasive features present in twenty randomly selected Ted Talks narratives: ten American English and ten Egyptian Arabic narratives. The paper employs Cockcroft and Cockcroft's model of persuasion (2013) with its three tripartite divisions of Aristotle's Ethos, Pathos and Logos. The contrastive analysis is done within Marc Alexander's (2009) adapted version of Mann and Thompson's Rhetorical Structure Theory (1988), which best suits the data under investigation. The paper adds more items under the presentational and subject matter relations introduced by Mann and Thompson's RST, so that more types of utterances are easily identified and categorized. It also compares and contrasts the techniques used in both languages to examine the types employed for persuasion of the two different types of audience.

In order to find solutions in the current panorama of “post-truth” and “anti-intellectualism,” a recent report from the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons has suggested a move towards more direct communication from experts. Since some historical examples have shown that experts’ excessive confidence and patronisation of the public resulted in breaking trust between Science and Society, my study focuses on the possible pitfalls of direct communication from experts. I took the TED Talks format as a case study, as its core feature is precisely a direct popularisation of any topic from the most authoritative experts in any field. My quantitative and textual analysis of TED Talks on Artificial Intelligence (AI) highlighted that the tone of the majority of the talks given by experts in the field is overly optimistic and patronising, and that AI is depicted through a discourse of unchallengeability and inevitability. My analysis has also shown that the only talks which present less commanding tones, and tackling issues, are those given by non-experts. With non- experts I mean speakers whose expertise is not strictly related to the research and development of AI. My study emphasised the potential dangers of seeing the developers of a technology also as the most authoritative communicators about that technology. I concluded that, if we want to build a long-lasting bond of trust between Science and Society, we need to provide different angles, which require voices from people who are not directly touched in their work by public discussion. This necessity ultimately reaffirms mediators as key-figures in the communication between experts and the public.