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Article published In: English Text Construction
Vol. 15:1 (2022) ► pp.89–111

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Narrative discourse in TED Talks

 | The Open University
Published online: 27 March 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00051.win
Abstract
This article investigates the extent to which TED talks can be considered a narrative register. This study analyses ‘narrative versus non-narrative discourse’ (Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) 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
References (24)
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