Facilitating listeners’ understanding of scientific knowledge in TED Talks: A corpus-based analysis of code glosses as metadiscourse resources of popularization

Abstract

A considerable amount of research has established that media discourse is an interactive event whose success and efficiency depend on speaker-listener relationship. Yet the nature of this interaction has been explored in a great number of studies, few works deal with how TED speakers address the needs of their listeners and manage the interaction with them. TED is considered to be one of the new ways of spreading scientific information online. Due to being an emerging genre, TED Talks have barely been analyzed in terms of popularization tools used to facilitate listeners’ comprehension of materials presented by TED speakers. Drawing on a corpus of 80 transcripts of TED Talks derived from the ted.com website, this study explores how TED speakers elaborate their ideas to address listeners’ needs. The aim of this research is to explore the types of code glosses, their lexical realizations, pragmatic functions and frequencies of occurrence. In order to explore the types and frequency of code glosses employed in TED lectures, the present study applied the quantitative method. With the aim of identifying the pragmatic functions the code glosses serve in TED Talks, the study applied the interpretative method. The analysis of the corpus revealed that code glosses are a crucial element of expert-lay interactions serving the popularization function. Two types of code glossing were employed by TED speakers with the predominance of exemplifiers intended to facilitate listeners’ comprehension and make speaker’s ideas accessible through illustration or scenario-based elaboration. All code glosses found in the corpus serve the popularization purpose which indicates that TED speakers made attempts to recontextualize scientific content and make specialized concepts comprehensible for a lay listener.