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Abstract
The TED talk (www.ted.com) is a hybrid popularizing genre empowered by contemporary digital technologies in which different semiotic modes feature prominently and which is being extensively used in educational settings. This study is based on and further develops research on co-speech gestures in a selection of such talks from various knowledge domains, so as to shed light and raise awareness on the orchestration of different modal resources therein and as a way of contributing to the development of multimodal literacy in an ever changing educational landscape. Data description is based on multimodal transcription through an integrated method, which makes it possible to advance hypotheses about the interpretation of gestures in different contexts. The qualitative analysis will show various ways in which speech-synchronized gestures in the talks can contribute different (also simultaneous) ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings or metafunctions, especially when considered from a more global analytical perspective, viz. as repeated similar patterns over discourse chunks. Reference will also be made to Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis as an overarching framework, as some of the patterns appear to have the potential not only to enhance cohesion but also to subtly emphasize emotional and value-laden meanings, thus pushing the highly persuasive discourse of this genre of talks forward.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Also see one of TED’s offspring devoted to ‘lessons worth sharing’, i.e. TED-Ed, (https://ed.ted.com/).
2 The work was supported by the Italian Ministry for the University under the national programme ‘Knowledge dissemination across media in English: continuity and change in discourse strategies, ideologies, and epistemologies,’ (PRIN 2015 no.2015TJ8ZAS). The Pisa unit especially focused on the multimodal analysis of a collection of audiovisual materials covering different genres and disciplines to be used in the field of English for Specific Purposes.
3 See, for instance, Jewitt (Citation2014).
4 For the coding parameters used in the descriptions, e.g. hand configuration and position, reference was made to McNeill (Citation1992), Webb (Citation1996), Kendon (Citation2004), among others.
5 Multimodal ensembles are meaningful orchestrations of different modes which may involve various types of semiotic resources. For the sake of clarity, in the present account the modes focused on were mainly two (viz. words and gestures), although others were occasionally considered and could/should be expanded on, too.
6 Also see Eisenstein, Barzilay, Davis (Citation2008) for a computational approach to gestural cohesion as predictor of topic boundaries.
7 Evaluation is here viewed as an umbrella term covering different types of affective-emotional attitudes and value judgements manifesting the speaker’s stance.
8 For a recent investigation of ideological stance in another genre (economics lecture) on the basis of the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis see, for example, Crawford Camiciottoli (Citation2019).
9 On the view of the argumentative thread as superimposing on other discourse dimensions see Merlini (Citation1981).
10 Using TED screenshots for research is permitted by CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International. I would like to thank the TED Media Requests Team for their support.
11 Multimodally-contributed humour would certainly deserve further exploration on its own (more examples, also involving enacted dialogism, where tackled in Masi, Citation2016, Citation2019b; on the multimodal enactment of characters cf. Valeiras-Jurado & Ruiz-Madrid, Citation2019).
12 Even though this and the preceding example display gestures with co-speech containing deictic pronouns, the main contribution of the gestures there seems to be representational-ideational, while an indexical function reinforcing textual cohesion, in ex. 2 in particular, appears to emerge via repetition of a similar configuration across discourse chunks (see later on).
13 In the following examples, only the screenshots for some of the gestures involved in the different threads are provided (for lack of space).
14 Further developments are also needed to evaluate the role of gestural cohesion in relation to and as part of multimodal cohesion (van Leeuwen, Citation2005).
15 Multimodal argumentation (Tseronis & Forceville, Citation2017) is indeed an avenue for further investigation.