Assignment 4
Among these top twenty talks of TED, I found the most frequent words as
the following table shows:
rank
frequency
words
156
51
human
157
51
never
153
52
better
149
53
applause
147
54
change
142
57
give
141
58
thought
139
59
believe
108
84
first
105
86
life
87
109
time
89
104
work
78
137
world
70
158
think
As you can see in the table, I would choose some words that interested me,
including better, change, believe, life, time, world, and think. I would like to
explore more about these words, so I put them into N-Grams/ cluster to see what
the concordances the speaker uses. Therefore, I would focus on the verbs. As you
can see, the red words are verbs.
First, I found that there are 5 hits in the phrase ‘think about’, the speaker
always encourages people to think about the content of the speech because the
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speaker maybe want the audience to follow the same pace with them, and it is a
good way to catch audiences’ attention. For example, “And they start up that path
by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a
cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere
utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.”(from
‘How to spot a liar’, 2011), In addition, it could make the audience associate with
their daily life, such as ‘Think about your own work. Think about your own
work.’(from ‘Puzzle of motivation, 2009’)
Second, I dig up the concordance ‘time you’. The word time here is to be a
verb. It is my first time to see realize the usage of verb in the word ’time’. In the
sentence “I'm going to time you. How quickly you can solve this problem?” The
meaning of the word is to measure the time of doing a behavior.
Third, the word I would like to talk about is ‘believe’. I love the
word ’believe’ because it is such a positive word. In the talk Vulnerability, there
are a period that says, “And the last, which I think is probably the most important,
is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that
says, "I'm enough," then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and
gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.” The
speaker uses two times on ‘believe’. As far as I am concerned, perhaps, the
speaker would like to emphasize on the point he mentions and to inspire the
audiences’ thoughts.
The last one is ‘change.’ There are 9 hits on ‘change the’, 8 hits on ‘change
your’, and 7 hits on ‘change our’. The two foreparts are to describe a fact. For
instance, “They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll
change the course of the world” and “So I want to start by offering you a free
no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for
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two minutes.” However, the latter one is to stir up or inspire the audiences’
thoughts and it helps the same feelings interacting with the speaker and listener.
In summary, words can be used in different ways and have different
functions. I think in the further exploration in these talks could focus on the
psychology of the speaker and think about why he or she choose these words to
deliver.
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