Mediatization of English Motivational Discourse in the Context of TED Talks

Abstract

This article examines a special form of motivational discourse in the format of TED Talks, which have become popular and accessible to a wide audience thanks to the use of various media formats such as video, audio, live broadcasts, and the TED Talks Internet platform. The aim of the article is to conduct a cognitive and discursive analysis of the expressive means used by TED Talk speakers to have an impact on the cognitive and emotional sphere of the audience. Based on the method of complete text sampling, the author compiles a limited corpus of texts on the topics of “Language Learning” and “Business”, which are subjected to further cognitive and discursive analysis, revealing the features of the organization of the TED Talks media text, phonetic, lexical and grammatical units related to the lecture topic and used by the TED speaker to convey information. In particular, the author identifies the use of techniques such as pausing, intonation, vocal expression, rhetorical questions, repetition, and parallelism. The author concludes that changes in intonation and pausing are used by the speaker to enhance the expression of emotions, emphasize important points, and provide additional emphasis. Analysis of semantic and syntactic features has revealed a number of speech peculiarities of TED lecturers that are capable of influencing message perception. It has been found that the special nature of the speech pragmatics of TED Talks lectures, such as the use of repetitions, analogies, and metaphors, parallel constructions, short sentences, etc., helps the TED speaker to emphasize the key ideas or concepts in speech, inspire, tune the listener to a certain action or behavior, as well as promote the memorization of information and the retention of listeners’ attention. The author emphasizes that the motivational discourse of TED Talks lectures is extremely interesting and promising for modern linguistic research in the context of its media coverage and popularization.