Ways of meaning, ways of acting. Exploring identity and intersubjective positioning in TED Talks on climate change.

The study will make an analysis of language resources construing attitudinal positioning and evaluative stance in TED Talks on the issue of climate change. As a hybrid discourse type at the crossroad between professional and educational discourses, the talks are video recordings of speeches delivered at TED conferences aimed at enlightening or ‘inspiring’ people, which are hosted on the online platform TED.com. While in his study on importance-markers, Partington (2014) coins the term 'enlightentainment'- thus emphasizing the double nature of the Talks, Drasoevan and Tagg (2015) make use of the Appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005), combined with quantitative tools of corpus linguistics, to examine linguistic choices in users’ reactions to videos on the topic of food. Building on an ongoing long-standing interest in media representation(s) of climate change and environmental issues (Bevitori 2010a and b, 2011, 2014; Bevitori and Johnson 2017), the aim of this paper is two-fold. The first is to investigate the linguistic resources acting to construe affiliation and attitudinal alignment in the Talks on climate change purposefully selected by TED educators to ‘illuminate the nature and scale of current-day climate science, policy and ethics’. The second is to assess the potentials (and constraints) of a corpus-assisted discourse and meaning analysis approach (Miller et al 2015) to the study of this multimodal and multiliteracy 'affinity' space (Gee 2004), which may be seen as an increasingly important area of science popularization (Sugimoto et al. 2013).