Interactive metadiscourse, as the language component that best reflects the interpersonal function, is a crucial part of metadiscourse research. However, the current research on interactive metadiscourse in China focuses on written discourse, especially academic writing, but relatively less on public media speech. Secondly, although there is a lot of literature on cross-linguistic, cross-cultural or cross-disciplinary comparative analysis, there are few cross-gender related comparative studies. Based on the above two points, this study takes TED business talks as an example to examine the use of engagement markers by male and female speakers.

    This paper Built two gender-specific corpora (each with 25 TED talks from speakers of different genders), and used a more detailed engagement marker classification framework to compare the use of engagement markers by men and woman. It was found that the distribution of each type of marker in the two corpora is approximately the same. Significant difference analysis by log-likelihood software revealed that there are many similarities and differences in the use of engagement markers by TED speakers of different genders. The frequency of engagement markers in both corpora is in the order of reader pronoun, directives, and shared knowledge. Male speakers use more engagement markers than female speakers, most notably in the reader pronouns. The most frequently used is inclusive first-person pronouns, and the least frequently used is indefinite pronouns. Although there is no significant difference in shared knowledge used by men and women, the former have a balanced use of single word and muti-word expressions, and the latter prefer to use the single word forms. Given the worldwide attention and popularity of TED talks, the study has certain