Opening and closing strategies in the literature and in TED talks: A contrastive approach

Details

Supervisors

De Cock, Sylvie

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue

Abstract

TED talks, short videos broadcasting conferences hold all over the world, captivate a wide-ranging audience. Referring to a great variety of topics, they are a wealth of information for everyone. One could thus wonder how speakers manage to deliver such inspiring and interesting presentations. The goal of this dissertation was to explore the different strategies adopted by the speakers of a careful selection of 40 TED talks in their opening and closing; two presentations’ parts of the utmost importance. The first chapter of this study consists of the most frequent well-documented opening and closing strategies, which would serve as a basis for the forthcoming TED talks’ analysis. In the first instance, the transcriptions of the 40 videos were carefully prepared and adapted, and various contextual elements that could have a potential influence on the way speakers deliver their speech have been included. The research was conducted in two main steps: the determination of where the openings and closings of the selected TED talks started and ended as a first step, and the identification of the used strategies a second step. After a quantitative analysis which made it possible to get an initial response to the two research questions, a second qualitative analysis provided other interesting findings. It turned out that all speakers of the 40 TED talks combined several strategies, both in their opening and their closing. Various use patterns were uncovered and a great variation in the adoption of opening and closing techniques was to be noticed. Speakers therefore have a certain degree of autonomy and flexibility in their use of strategies in a context specific to TED conferences.