A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of TED Talks in Health Care

Abstract

Based on multimodal discourse analysis, this study selected 10 TED talks in healthcare and examined how different symbolic resources embodied in academic spoken discourse form units of meaning, both verbally and nonverbally, using Halliday's theory of systemic functional linguistics and Kress and Van Leeuwen's visual grammar. Through a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach, verbal and nonverbal elements are analyzed and shown to work together in meaning-making, revealing how speakers communicate ideas and influence listeners. The findings show the characteristics of the different symbolic resources and identify how they produce meaning to reinforce the academic speaker's message, suggesting that the adopted theoretical framework can be used for multimodal discourse analysis of public speech.