Nataliia S. Blinova

The article deals with examples of humour creation and their verbal and non-verbal peculiarities in English popular scientific discourse. These examples are known as TED lectures or TED talks. Humour is oft en used by speakers to attract the audience’s attention. It happens while establishing a contact or focusing attention on some concrete aspects in the lecture’s content. The information in the lecture is used for transmitting complex ideas, which in the process of perception may become not so sophisticated in English popular scientific discourse. 

The text of the speech is shaping the analysis of verbal mechanisms of humour representing orally popular scientific discourse, sometimes mingled with non-verbal features. The understanding of cognitive mechanisms of humour creation in the orator’s speech and the perception of it by the listeners is expressed by a verbal form and it is combined with the nonverbal and multimodal characteristics. It may help language learners improving their language skills and understanding of English as well as providing the better perception and comprehension of the professional speech in the English language. Besides that, humour studies in lectures aimed at the audience in English in TED lectures may reveal the way speakers use humour, and pointing which particular features depend upon the situational-pragmatic characteristics of communication. The authors of the article represent the difference between a special text and special discourse to perform a much deeper analysis of the discussed problems. The material of this research is based on the text of the lecture by the well-known American neurophysiologist Stuart Firestein (Firestein, 2013).