STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF INFLUENTIAL MONOLOGUES: AN EXPLORATION OF PROMINENT STYLISTIC FEATURES IN ENGLISH TED TALKS
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Abstract
Today, public speaking is considered one of the most powerful and influential forms of communication to motivate change, influence decisions and boost creativity. TED Talk is one of the influential public speaking forums that encourage the audience to think innovatively and focus on the achievement of their set goals. The starting point of the present research is the notion that TED Talks stand unique among other genres in terms of their prominent stylistic features. Thus, stylistic patterns and their communicative functions in influential English TED Talks were investigated in addition to linguistic choices to highlight significant lexical features, phonological variations, semantic representations, and discourse style in this spoken genre. The triangulation research method was employed to quantify the results of the Influential English TED Talks Corpus (IETTC) containing transcribed files of 2000 talks to interpret it qualitatively. The analysis of prominent stylistic features showed that TED speakers employ particular linguistic choices during digital content creation on public speaking platforms to persuade the audience. TED Talks enjoys a semi-formal form of spoken communication that contains formal and colloquial lexis, content and functional words, jargon, slang and so forth. This genre has a particular discourse style for being interactive, involved, persuasive and non-narrative. Talks are also adorned with similes and metaphors. The findings seem fair to conclude TED Talks as a distinct genre of public speaking. This research can further be extended to explore the morpho-syntactic schemes of TED Talks or to explore the features of undiscovered spoken genres.
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