THE USE OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING: AN ANALYSIS OF SIMILE STRUCTURE IN ENGLISH TED TALKS
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Abstract
One of the aims of public speaking is to convey maximum information in a few words for maximum effectiveness. Figurative language makes sentences more expressive and vivid through deep meanings. Today, figurative language has also been used in non-literary genres, especially in communication. The present study explores the linguistic mechanism of similes in English TED to analyze how TED speakers frequently use this rhetorical trope to compare two ideas, actions and objects. This corpus-based research employed a quantitative research method to quantify the phrase structures of similes in Influential English TED Talks Corpus (IETTC) containing 10 population groups, 2,000 transcribed files and more than 3.4 million tokens. First of all, similes representing node words ‘like’ and ‘as’ were explored in the annotated version of the corpus and their phrase structures and patterns were further analyzed. The findings revealed that TED speakers employ expressions ‘like’ and ‘as’ in their speeches to convey their ideas more explicitly beyond literal meanings. The density of the simile expression ‘as’ was found higher than ‘like’. The phrase level analysis showed that noun phrase + node words (like/as) + noun phrase is the most common structure in the selected corpus in terms of collocation on both sides of the node words. It is also observed in the analysis that verb phrases usually occur on the left side of the simile expressions and are rarely found on the right side. The results seem fair to conclude that figurative language is not confined to poetry or other literary work only but has been employed today in public speaking and non-literary work to convey hidden notions and ideas.
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