“But as a deeper dive, I want to focus on this” : Discourse reflexivity in TED talks

Abstract: Metadiscourse, or discourse about discourse, manifests itself in both spoken and written genres. However, the focus of existing studies of spoken metadiscourse remains mainly on academic speaking (Hyland, 2017), whereas research on metadiscourse in spoken non-academic genres is much less common. The present study thus investigates, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the use of metadiscourse in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks, which are primarily monologic speeches aiming at knowledge dissemination among a lay audience. The corpus for this exploratory study comprises the top 20 most viewed speeches (49,000 tokens and 286 minutes of presentation time) presented in English at an official TED conference in 2019. This study attempts at shedding light on how TED speakers use metadiscourse from the perspective of the discourse functions by applying Ädel’s (2023) taxonomy of reflexive metadiscourse. The results reveal that TED speakers demonstrate a high level of audience orientation. The findings also indicate a strong focus on discourse organization, which underlines the importance of making this explicit in TED talks, thus providing guidance for the audience. One of the key observations of this study is that the audience in the genre of TED talks is complex, as talks are not only presented live when recorded, but also made available to a global, online audience. The thesis aims to contribute insights to TED talks as a genre, enhance the taxonomy development for metadiscourse, and suggest potential pedagogical implications for teaching public speaking.