Abstract

The public speech essentially is a way for a speaker to express his idea in front of the public. In the multimedia era, the public speech is no longer limited to an inspiring draft, but includes many paralanguage and non-verbal modalities, such as images, voice, gesture, etc., which enriches the forms of idea expression. In the previous studies of public speech, however, scholars tended to take the speech draft itself or discourse structure as their research object, but ignored the function of other modalities. The Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), which emerged in 1990s, provides an effective way to give a rounded analysis of the public speech. Therefore, with MDA framework, this study analyses the most popular TED speech in 2015, attempting to explore: 1) how these modalities are related to and interact each other; 2) what are the functions of these media symbols. The analysis finds out firstly, visual modality has all ideational, interpersonal and textual functions to express meaning while sound modality mainly has the interpersonal function. Secondly, comparing with other symbols discussed above, image has all these three functions. According to this finding, the thesis gives three suggestions for giving a successful speech.

Key Words: Multimodal discourse analysis; TED; visual grammar；Systemic Functional Linguistics

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

I. Introduction-1

1.1 Research Background-1

1.2 Research Purposes-1

1.3 Significance of This Study-1

1.4 Data Collection and Analysis-2

II. Literature Review-3

2.1 Previous Studies of MDA-3

2.2 Previous Studies on the Public Speech-4

III. Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis-6

3.1 Zhang Delu’s Synthetic Theoretical Framework for MDA-6

3.2 Relationships among Modalities-7

IV. A Case Study: The Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Most Popular TED Speech--“What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness” by Robert Waldinger.-8

4.1 Analysis of the Visual Modality in the Speech-9

4.1.1 Analysis of the Image in PPT-9

4.1.2 The Analysis of Video Clips Used in the TED Speech-11

4.1.3 The Analysis of the Subtitle-11

4.2 Analysis of the Paralanguage Modality in the Speech-11

4.2.1 The Pause and Stress-11

4.2.2 The Pitch and Speed-11

4.3 Analysis of the Nonverbal Modality in the Speech-12

4.3.1 Gesture and Posture-12

4.3.2 Facial Expressions-13

V. Conclusion-15

5.1 Major Findings-15

5.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study-15

References-16