Most of the keywords in TED talk top 20 are function words, such as “the”,
“and”, “I” and so on. Still, there are some content words in the high-frequency group.
To begin with, the word “have” has 376 frequencies and ranks 22 as the highest rank
in the content word genre. The keyness is 471.261. However, sometimes “have” could
serve as function words in terms of perfect tense.
The condition is the same with the word “like” with the frequency of 284 and
the keyness of 353.486. “Like” could serve both as function words and content words.
In the sentence like “...everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they ‘like’
the most, to the one they ‘like’ the least,” the word “like” served as a content word.
However, in most of the sentences such as “...it’s like base camp...,” it served as a
function word.
The next word caught my attention in the content word genre is “people” ranked
36 with 271 frequencies and 336.859 keyness. From the sentences in the data,
“people” is widely used in every articles. It might be that the topics of TED talk are
concerning all kinds of aspects surrounding human from the places we live in to the
way we think. Also, the speeches are addressed to people and by people. The idea
applied to the result that “human” also has 55.960 keyness and 50 frequencies. Since
the speech, speech giver and the audience are highly related the people, it might be
the reason to this result.
Another keyword I found interesting is “know”. It is ranked as 49th place with
270.399 keyness. In my perspective, since the purpose of TED talk is spreading ideas
to people, this could explain the reason “know” is on the top keyword list. “Know” is
about ideas, perception, and knowledge, which are the topic and goal in every TED
talk. We could see examples in sentences like “...we know that’s a measurement
error...” On the other hand, the word “know” also plays an important role in our daily
conversation. In sentences like “...you know, the ticking really...,” “you know” is a
common and frequently used catch-phrase in our actual conversation. As a result, it
could be found a lot in spoken materials.
The keywords with keyness higher than 50 are a lot in the data. Most of them are
function words. It is the content words that are worth our attention. The keywords in
the content word genre are connected the general topic ideas or the usage of our daily
conversation. The statistic results provide us an interesting insight to our language use
and mindset.