Assignment 4 Among these top twenty talks of TED, I found the most frequent words as the following table shows: rank frequency words 156 51 human 157 51 never 153 52 better 149 53 applause 147 54 change 142 57 give 141 58 thought 139 59 believe 108 84 first 105 86 life 87 109 time 89 104 work 78 137 world 70 158 think As you can see in the table, I would choose some words that interested me, including better, change, believe, life, time, world, and think. I would like to explore more about these words, so I put them into N-Grams/ cluster to see what the concordances the speaker uses. Therefore, I would focus on the verbs. As you can see, the red words are verbs. First, I found that there are 5 hits in the phrase ‘think about’, the speaker always encourages people to think about the content of the speech because the 1 speaker maybe want the audience to follow the same pace with them, and it is a good way to catch audiences’ attention. For example, “And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.”(from ‘How to spot a liar’, 2011), In addition, it could make the audience associate with their daily life, such as ‘Think about your own work. Think about your own work.’(from ‘Puzzle of motivation, 2009’) Second, I dig up the concordance ‘time you’. The word time here is to be a verb. It is my first time to see realize the usage of verb in the word ’time’. In the sentence “I'm going to time you. How quickly you can solve this problem?” The meaning of the word is to measure the time of doing a behavior. Third, the word I would like to talk about is ‘believe’. I love the word ’believe’ because it is such a positive word. In the talk Vulnerability, there are a period that says, “And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, "I'm enough," then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.” The speaker uses two times on ‘believe’. As far as I am concerned, perhaps, the speaker would like to emphasize on the point he mentions and to inspire the audiences’ thoughts. The last one is ‘change.’ There are 9 hits on ‘change the’, 8 hits on ‘change your’, and 7 hits on ‘change our’. The two foreparts are to describe a fact. For instance, “They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world” and “So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for 2 two minutes.” However, the latter one is to stir up or inspire the audiences’ thoughts and it helps the same feelings interacting with the speaker and listener. In summary, words can be used in different ways and have different functions. I think in the further exploration in these talks could focus on the psychology of the speaker and think about why he or she choose these words to deliver. 3