Speaker Identity vs. Speaker diversity. The case of TED Talks

Popularisation is called upon to recast power relations and scholars depend on exposition to communicate their opinions and ideologies. More specifically, the identity of ‘expert’ and ‘layman’ is built up through reformulation procedures implicit in the popularization process (Hamilton 1996). The lay-reader is seen as a new discursive agent who plays an active role in taking decisions on the basis of the information received. The aim of the study is to investigate the concepts of ‘speaker identity’ and ‘speaker diversity’ in the TED talks corpus. The main goal will be to focus on language differentiation deriving from different rhetorical choices made by speakers belonging to different professional categories. TED talks are delivered by experts – specialists in a great number of different fields – and are aimed at a non-specialist audience. The talks are made available online by a nonprofit organization devoted to ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’. TED started out (in 1984) as a conference which brought together people from three separate worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become broader. Today TED ‘[…]offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other’ (http://www.ted.com/ ages/about). In the present study, attention will be devoted to ‘how’ speakers belonging to a number of different professional categories build up their own identity through the employment of specific rhetorical choices. The concepts of ‘stance’ and ‘engagement’ (Hyland 2000, 2005) are fundamental here, as they involve ‘positioning’ by the speaker / writer. In particular, ‘‘ ‘stance’ […] can be seen as an attitudinal dimension including features which refer to the ways writers present themselves and convey their judgement, opinions and commitments’ (Hyland 2005, 176). Conversely, ‘engagement’ concerns the position advanced in the text by the writer (Hyland 2001). It implies recognizing the presence of the readers, as the readers themselves are guided by interpretations