A Pragmatic analysis of emotion-triggering strategies in TED talks

Abstract

TED talks are a relatively new genre, in which experts in different fields share their knowledge, ideas and experiences to large audiences. The talks are broadcasted worldwide, thus reaching international and intercultural spectators. Although public spoken language has been extensively studied in literature, TED talks present a new field of study, and are considered as a hybrid genre. It has been argued that, although similar in some ways, they differ from other oral discourse types, such as university lectures, in many aspects, such as the epistemic stance, the presentation of ideas, or the macro-discourse markers used (Caliendo and Compagnone, 2014). The utilization of emotion for triggering audience response is the foundation of the present study, aimed at examining the way speakers use emotions to involve spectators in their monologues, and exploring other strategies exploited to spark feedback, so that the most successful ones can be identified. The paper discusses the analysis of 120 TED talks from two different topics, business and education, taking a basic list of emotion words as a starting point, to continue examining how these emotion words and audiences intermingle by looking into laughter and applause, as the two identified forms of feedback. Results indicate that no significant differences can be found in the two subcorpora analyzed in terms of emotion words, the use of multiple humor strategies, and the acknowledgment of multicultural audiences on the side of the speakers.