Narrative discourse in TED Talks
This article investigates the extent to which TED talks can be considered a narrative register. This study
analyses ‘narrative versus non-narrative discourse’ (
Biber 1988) in a corpus of TED
talks (
n = 2483). TED talks were found to be typically non-narrative (−2.47 mean). However, there was a great
degree of variation, with approximately 10% of talks (
n = 257) classified as narrative. When TED talks were
compared to registers in prior studies they were close to academic prose and presented a similar pattern in terms of disciplinary
variation, with ‘soft’ disciplines closer to narratives. When textual data was examined, the average TED talk was found to weave
narrative and descriptive elements, but were found to be more descriptive overall.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Method
- 2.1Analysing narrative discourse
- 2.2The TED Talk Corpus
- 3.Findings and discussion
- 3.1Narrative versus non-narrative dimension scores
- 3.2Comparisons to other registers in prior research
- 3.3The expression of narrative versus non-narrative discourse within TED talk texts
- 3.3.1TED talks with high dimension scores
- 3.3.2TED talks with low dimension scores
- 3.3.3TED talks with average dimension scores
- 4.Conclusion
- 4.1Summary
- 4.2Limitations
- 4.3Implications
- Note
-
References