Chinese Name:卓靜吟 English Name: Judy Cho Class: 碩專一
Lexical Teaching Assignment 4
No. NA4C0002
Date:11.23.2015
Top 20 TED Talks Analysis
My corpus is composed of top 20 TED talks and the reference corpus is
the spoken section in the BNC. Besides most frequent function words, such as
we/ our, I, my, I chose content words (lexical words) to examine why these
words are significant in terms of the common themes of the top 20 TED talks,
because content words help people form mental images during a conversation.
As shown in Table1.1, keywords I chose are listed below.
RANK
FREQUENCY
WORD
4
1672
I
13
777
we
21
393
my
22
376
have
36
271
people
53
211
our
78
136
world
104
88
most
105
86
life
135
61
around
156
50
human
First of all, speakers use I most often because people are egocentric and
the reason why speakers deliver their speeches is that they want to share some
spectacular and worth- spreading ideas in their minds. Sentences below
describe that I is the most important word to spread speakers’ perspectives.
1 in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples.
2 One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we
3 I'm here because I believe emotion is the force of life. All of us here
Second, speakers use their own life experiences to let the audience know
the ideas they want to share and usually form good links between the audience
and speakers, they use both I and my often, as shown in the sentences below.
1 When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were
2 those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover
Chinese Name:卓靜吟 English Name: Judy Cho Class: 碩專一
Lexical Teaching Assignment 4
No. NA4C0002
Date:11.23.2015
3 when I was in Denmark, my host was named Anne Marie. And I said, "So
Third, in the case of we (777 times) appears a lot. Some uses of we refer to
the people that speakers had mentioned, some refer to the professionals or
researchers in speakers’ fields, and others refer to all human beings in the
world.
1 laying off people -- this is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world.
2 today we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day.
3 We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think
Overall, these popular talks are for general audience around the world;
therefore, speakers try to relate every single person to this global we have and
the words such as we, most, human, around, world appear quite often.