An Analysis Of TED Public Speech From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Public speech is an important way to communicate with people, which attracts scholars at home and abroad to make a study of its discourse from various perspectives. Nowadays, TED Public Speech becomes more and more popular. However, the study of d iscourse of TED Public Speech is very limited. Therefore, this thesis applies Martin's Appraisal Theory as its theoretical framework to analyzing the discourse of TED Public Speech with the purpose of exploring the way speakers use appraisal resource to express his point of view to influence people's behaviors and attitude.This thesis integrates quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the discourse of ten speeches from the three main themes of TED Public Speech(technology, entertainment and design), in order to study the distribution of three appraisal resources, analyze its features and explore causes of the phenomena. The research shows most speakers use quite a few appraisal resources to establish a good interpersonal relationship with the audie nce. Among the ten speeches, the speakers tend to use more positive vocabulary than negative one, more direct resources than indirect resources. Some negative resources are employed to negate other researchers' findings or common belief. Second, TED speakers tend to use many other voices and stances to establish interaction with the audience, thus, expanding dialogic space. When expressing their own opinions, these speakers tend to enhance the discourse authority by quoting other voices. Third, as to the graduation system, the speakers tend to use more up-scaling force than the down-scaling force, more sharpened focus than softened focus. In these speeches, these speakers use up-scaling or sharpen lexical to stress their strong attitudes and proper engagement.This thesis uses the Appraisal Theory to study the discourses of TED Public Speech with the purpose of better appreciating the linguistic art of TED Public Speech and proving the universality of applying Appraisal Theory to discourse analysis. The find ing of the study is also of significance in the design of public speech.