Constructing proximity in popularization discourse: Evidence from lexical bundles in TED talks

Taking Hyland’s (2010) proximity as its conceptual orientation and lexical bundles as its analytical lens, the present study explores the extent to which phraseological configurations in TED talks encode the five facets of proximity. Adopting a corpus-informed discourse analytical approach to lexical bundles (frequently occurring four-word sequences in text), we aim to describe the popularizing features TED talks present. Lexical bundles are identified and extracted from a corpus of 500 TED talks totaling about 1.1 million words, followed by an analysis of their indexicality related to proximity. This study reveals that, in addition to communicating the lay version of knowledge, TED talks are devoted to both a democratic means of communication by facilitating audience comprehension and mitigating speaker-audience asymmetry and to a promotional agenda not dissimilar to that of advertising. These characteristics allow for movement between proximity of commitment and proximity of membership. This study demonstrates the indexical function of lexical bundles, expanding on their role as a discovery tool for obtaining a generic profile of a particular genre.