Abstract
<p>This paper explores how academic discourse is reconceptualized as a professional practice via the web-mediated genre of TED talks (Technology, Entertainment and Design), popularizing speeches delivered by experts in fields that range from the ‘hard’ disciplines to the social sciences and the humanities. More precisely, this study compares two corpora of academic spoken discourse, i.e., a corpus of transcribed TED talks given by academics (TED_ac) and a corpus of university lecture transcripts (MICASE_lect) drawn from the <em>Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English </em>(MICASE) to understand how academics’ communicative purposes differ in these two settings. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Genre Analysis (Bhatia 2012) and Discourse Analysis (Goffman 1981; Fairclough 1989; Pennycook 1994; De Fina 1995; Benwell/Stokoe 2006; De Fina 2006), the present study sets out to investigate ways in which academics make use of language on the TED stage to achieve their “private intentions” as professionals (Bhatia 2012), e.g., building up their identity as experts as well as promoting their research and scholarship, rather than training a group of novices in their discipline or merely informing mass audiences. To this end, consideration is given to the distribution of first and second person pronouns in the two pragmatic contexts under investigation. Special emphasis is placed on referents and discourse functions of the pronoun <em>we</em>, which is significantly more frequent in TED_ac than in MICASE_lect. Despite its language-centered approach, this study has a marked sociological intent, as it casts light on an instance of academic discourse seen as an example of “professional practice” embedded in the wider context of a “professional culture” (Bhatia 2012).</p>
Highlights
This study is situated within the research field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and draws on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) (Bhatia 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012) and Discourse Analysis (DA) (Goffman 1981; Fairclough 1989; Pennycook 1994; De Fina 1995; Benwell/Stokoe 2006; De Fina et al 2006) as well as on the methods of corpus linguistics (Baker 2006; Baker et al 2008) to explore the way in which academic discourse is reconceptualized and recontextualized as a professional practice via the Web
A contrastive analysis was carried out by comparing a corpus of transcribed TED talks delivered by academics to a corpus of university lecture transcripts to observe whether, and if so to what extent, academics’ discursive practices of self-presentation differ in these two settings
Consideration was given to the way in which academics appropriate the TED stage to convey their “private intentions” (Bhatia 2012) – i.e. to build up their image as experts and promote their research – apart from training novices in their disciplines or merely informing mass audiences
Summary
This study is situated within the research field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and draws on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) (Bhatia 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012) and Discourse Analysis (DA) (Goffman 1981; Fairclough 1989; Pennycook 1994; De Fina 1995; Benwell/Stokoe 2006; De Fina et al 2006) as well as on the methods of corpus linguistics (Baker 2006; Baker et al 2008) to explore the way in which academic discourse is reconceptualized and recontextualized as a professional practice via the Web. Caliendo acknowledges the novelty of this format and emphasizes its “discursive hybridity” (2014b: 113), pointing out the fact that TED talks lie at the intersection of a number of genre types, e.g. university lectures, newspaper articles, conference presentations and TV science programmes, mixing different semiotic modes, i.e. spoken, written, video and audio From this point of view, TED talks provide a clear example of the way in which web-mediated popularization discourse has spurred the emergence of new genres, which result from the contamination of different discursive and professional practices and purposes (e.g. informational, promotional and providing entertainment). Against this background, exploring TED talks was seen as useful for contributing to theoretical understanding relating to popularization discourse and, from a wider perspective, the critical analysis of genre, with special focus on spoken academic discourse
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