Linguistic realizations of engagement in TED talks

Abstract

The article describes linguistic items used for actualizing the engagement strategy in the oral genre of popular science discourse of TED lectures, which seems to be understudied in modern scientific linguistics literature. A huge number of studies have shown that popular science discourse is an interactive event, the success of which depends on the degree and efficiency of interaction between the speaker and the audience. However, the metadiscourse strategies employed in popular science genres, including TED talks addressed to a wide audience, remain insufficiently studied. The research gap in this area of pragmalinguistics predetermines the need to study the strategies of interaction between the speaker and the audience. The research corpus consists of 80 scripts of TED talks posted on the ted.com website. The aim of the study is to analyze linguistic items used for realizing the strategy of engagement of the audience into the discussion, their categories, pragmatic functions and frequency. In order to study the types, functions and frequency of linguistic actualizers of engagement, the methods of quantitative and interpretive analysis were adopted. The study showed that TED lecturers use a variety of language tools, the most productive of which were questions and reader mentions. It was found that at the lexical and grammatical levels, the engagement strategy was realized through imperative verbs, first and second personal pronouns, interrogative constructions, as well as impersonal constructions with solidarity adjectives. The results of the analysis suggested that TED speakers strive to construct an effective dialogue with the addressee, to engage the audience in the process of representing scientific information, making it accessible to lay listeners. It was concluded that the pragmatically correct use of the engagement strategy in the genre of TED talks is an indicator of the pragmatic competence of the speaker and the key to effective communication with the audience.