A Comparative Study Of Comment Adjuncts In TED Talks

In Halliday’s(1994)Systemic-Functional Grammar,the adverbials that express speaker’s attitudes and comments on the propositions are called comment adjuncts,which are one of the important lexical and grammatical devices.In syntax,comment adjuncts are also a kind of sentence modifier,which modify the whole sentence they govern.So they are also called sentence adjuncts.Meanwhile,TED is a platform which is aimed at sharing and spreading ideas with the most inspirational,original and thought-provoking TED talks.It can be said that TED speeches play an important role in using the power of ideas to change attitudes,lives and ultimately,the world.Therefore,there must be a wealth of comment adjuncts resources in TED,which provides a good opportunity for investigating comment adjuncts.Since there are different types of topics in TED,the use of comment adjuncts in various talks may be different.So this thesis chose six kinds of main topics(business,design,entertainment,global,science,technology)as research subjects according to the hot search list of official website.The above six types of TED talks are composed of six self-made independent corpora with equivalent number of words each.The corpora includes 202 pieces of TED talks selected from the year of 2007 to 2016.The total volume of the corpora is about400,000 words.Thus this thesis adopts the system of comment adjuncts proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen(2004)as theoretical framework,analyzes the corpus by the use of Antconc3.5,and investigates the interpersonal meanings of comment adjuncts that are negotiated and constructed between the speakers and the receivers in different TED talks in order to present a panoramic picture of the overall use of comment adjuncts in TED speeches.Finally,some conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1)There is a wealth of comment adjunct resources in TED talks;(2)Both the propositional and speech-functional adjuncts are involved in single and integrated database.However,the frequency of speech-function adjuncts is much higher than that of the propositional ones;(3)By the micro statistical analysis of various comment adjuncts classified by Halliday(2004),there are the following five major findings:(a)It is worth noting that the factual type of comment adjuncts are frequently used in six corpora.It can be seen that every type of topic in six corpora lays emphasis on expressing views,attitudes and judgments from the perspective of fact;(b)Factual comment adjuncts as one of the types of speech-functional comment adjuncts,their great use increase the proportion of speech-functional adjuncts.Accordingly,the frequency of speech-function adjuncts is much higher than that of propositional ones;(c)It is found that there are marked differences in the using frequency of specific comment adjuncts.Some appear with high frequency,some has low frequency and some are not used at all.For example,six frequently used comment adjuncts with high frequency are naturalness,obviousness,desirability,persuasiveness,factualness and validity.This is consistent with the findings of Yang Xinzhang(2006)and Yang Linxiu(2008).Presumption,wisdom and morality,secrecy and accuracy types of comment adjuncts appear with low frequency.comment adjuncts of hesitancy and secrecy do not emerge in any corpus.(4)By comparing various comment adjuncts distributed in different corpus one by one,especially the most frequently used adjuncts(except factual type of comment adjuncts),it can be found that the using frequency of natural type of comment adjunct in science and technology corpus is most significant;obvious type of adjuncts are used evenly in each corpus;desirability type in design,global and technology corpus is most significant;assurance type of persuasive comment adjuncts is most significant in business corpus;validity type in global and business corpus is most significant;(5)In terms of interpersonal meaning,comment adjuncts belong to interpersonal adjuncts,which reflect interpersonal function and express the interpersonal meaning.Actually,the meaning of speakers expressed by comment adjuncts is what the speaker wants to transmit to the speaker.The meaning is from the speaker and expressed by the speaker,thus it can be said that comment adjuncts are speaker-oriented in essence.To be more specific,their interpersonal meaning can be divided into three types: Engagement Function,Judgment and Evaluation Function and Epistemic Function.Therefore,the interpersonal meaning expressed by comment adjuncts has distinctive subjectivity,which takes on its speaker-oriented feature.The study may help people understand and use this kind of language device,and provide some useful guidance for further research and the practice of making a speech.It is also helpful for people with the aid of this language means to try to figure out others’ communicative intention and mode.