Personal Metadiscourse Features on TED Talks by British Speakers

Abstract

The present research aims to analyze types and functions of personal metadiscourse used by native speakers (British) during their performance on TED Talks. The study applied Ädel's (2006) taxonomy of personal metadiscourse in academic discourses to capture the occurrences of personal metadiscourse. Personal metadiscourses (I, we, you) are commonly applied in written language. Only a few of them can be found in spoken language. Once there is the spoken one, they are typically performed in monologue setting, such as in classroom, seminar, or lecture environment. Data for this research were taken from 5 videos of TED Talks uploaded on YouTube. This study used a qualitative method to analyze the transcriptions provided on the videos. To identify and count the concordances of each unit of personal metadiscourse, AntConc 3.4.3w 2014 was applied. This study revealed that British speakers employ pronouns "I", "You", and "We" both in metatext and audience interaction. However, not all pronouns can be found in each function. In metatext category pronoun "You" is rarely used while pronoun I is mostly used by British speakers in discourse organization for exemplifying. Pronoun "You" and "We" are used in audience interaction category for managing messages. This study contributes to ESL/EFL teachers and students who are learning how to present facts effectively, argue and persuade convincingly, and manage speaker and listener visibility.

Researching Deixis of Joe Biden's Speech on “The Covid-19 Vaccination Program and the Effort to Defeat Covid-19 Globally” (2021)

“…It is found that pronoun "You" is rarely used while pronoun I is mostly used by British speakers in discourse organization for exemplifying. Pronoun "You" and "We" are used in audience interaction category for managing messages (Duwila & Probowati, 2021). In analyzing the types of deixis and the referent of deixis in this study, the writer only focus on looking at the types of deixis and placing them according to the group then with the referents to each word.…”