Establishing proximity in Knowledge-Dissemination genres. The case of TED talks

This paper focuses on a more recently developed Knowledge Dissemination genre, the TED talk, a series of on-line short talks whose purpose is to disseminate knowledge from various domains, ranging from humanities to science and engineering disciplines. TED talks are aimed at a non specialist audience and presented by speakers who are experts in their field, often top level academics or from important research institutes, but also people who have had remarkable experiences or accomplished remarkable things. Our corpus of TED talks will be examined in relation to aspects such as argumentation, lexical choice, rhetorical structures and discourse organisation drawing on the methods and instruments of corpus linguistics, textual linguistics, rhetoric, pragmatics and genre analysis.