Making Ideas Highly visible: A Multimodal Analysis of the Strategies in TED Speeches

Abstract The public speech essentially is a way for a speaker to express his idea in front of the public。 In the multimedia era, the public speech is no longer limited to an inspiring draft, but includes many paralanguage and non-verbal modalities, such as images, voice, gesture, etc。, which enriches the forms of idea expression。 In the previous studies of public speech, however, scholars tended to take the speech draft itself or discourse structure as their research object, but ignored the function of other modalities。 The Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), which emerged in 1990s, provides an effective way to give a rounded analysis of the public speech。 Therefore, with MDA framework, this study analyses the most popular TED speech in 2015, attempting to explore: 1) how these modalities are related to and interact each other; 2) what are the functions of these media symbols。 The analysis finds out firstly, visual modality has all ideational, interpersonal and textual functions to express meaning while sound modality mainly has the interpersonal function。 Secondly, comparing with other symbols discussed above, image has all these three functions。 According to this finding, the thesis gives three suggestions for giving a successful speech。74227

Key Words: Multimodal discourse analysis; TED; visual grammar；Systemic Functional Linguistics

让观点“清晰可见”——TED演讲中的多模态话语分析

摘要公共演讲就是演讲者面对公众发表言论的一种演讲形式。进入多媒体时代以来，公共演讲不再仅限于纯语言，而是加入了如图像、录音、手势等伴语言和非语言的多模态的手段。这些手段打破了语言符号的单一性，使意义的表现形式更加丰富多彩。然而之前对公共演讲的研究，通常把语言符号系统本身或文本内容作为研究对象，而忽视了多模态的作用，这使话语分析带有一定的局限性。20世纪90年代兴起的多模态话语分析正可解决这一局限性。因此本文将通过对 2015年最受欢迎的一场TED视演讲进行定量和定性研究，结合系统功能性理论框架，对1）各模态间是如何相互影响的即他们之间的关系是什么；2）各模态在意义表达上起了什么作用两个问题进行探讨。分析研究后发现，在多模态语篇中，视觉模态具备语言的三种功能：概念功能、人际功能和语篇功能，而声音模态则主要实施人际功能。同时，在视觉模态中，相比其他模态形式，图片兼具概念、人际和语篇三种功能。据此，文章最后对如何做一场成功的演讲提出了三条建议。

毕业论文关键词：多模态话语分析；TED；视觉语法；系统功能性理论

Contents

I。 Introduction 1

1。1 Research Background 1

1。2 Research Purposes 1

1。3 Significance of This Study 1

1。4 Data Collection and Analysis 2

II。 Literature Review 3

2。1 Previous Studies of MDA 3

2。2 Previous Studies on the Public Speech 4

III。 Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis 6

3。1 Zhang Delu’s Synthetic Theoretical Framework for MDA 6

3。2 Relationships among Modalities 7

IV。 A Case Study: The Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Most Popular TED Speech--“What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness” by Robert Waldinger。