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

I。 Introduction

1。1 Research Background

In 1950s, the discourse analysis was firstly proposed by Harris who is a famous American linguist。 After that, so far loads of scholars have spare no effort to put forward to many sorts of theories and research methodologies。 What methods they adopted is analyzing large quantities of cases for dissecting the inherent relationship among discourse modalities, ideology and the cognitive model。 However, these theories and methods almost refer to language as their research object; that is, they pay attention to the language system and semantic structure as well as the relationship between social culture and psychological cognition, but ignore image, sound, color, movement and other meaningful forms, which makes discourse analysis have great limitations。 In 1990s, multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) emerged in the western countries, and largely helped people overcome these limitations。 

MDA is a new discourse analysis。 Except for language symbols, it brings many sensory symbol systems, such as images, sound, movement, color as well as human facial expressions and body movements into meaning construction system。 That is to say, this theory breaks the tradition that language to be the only aiming subject of meaning expression in discourse analysis。 At the same time, with the modalities utilized in communication gradually transformed from only language to images and other symbols recently, the research range of discourse analysis has extended from verbal modality to other modalities like visual symbols, sound symbols and body language: photos, videos, gestures, music and so on。 However, in the semiotic aspect, comparing with other symbolic resources, image is of great significance in the meaning construction and representation。 

As one of the mass discourse, especially in multimedia era, public speech has already typified the multimodal discourse in this multimedia era。 Public speaking (sometimes termed oratory or oration) is the process or act of performing a presentation (a speech) focused around an inpidual directly speaking to a live audience in a structured, deliberate manner in order to inform, influence, or entertain them。 A successful English speech is the one in which language mode and non-language mode is used effectively; that is, highlighted theme and original ideas need adding in the speech, while from the perspective of non-language, paralanguage symbols like pitch and stress as well as proper body language need taking into consideration, meanwhile, eye contact, facial expression and head movement are also needed。 With the development of media technology and Internet Technology, how to combine nature discourse with multimodes is an important issue for modern linguistics, particularly for those in the field of discourse analysis。 At present, TED has been a hot way adopted by people to spread their ideas。 In order to catch more audiences, many TED speeches make full use of the picture, video clips, sound and so on。 The thesis is going to make a multimodal analysis of the most popular speech in TED。