PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN CLASSROOM: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF I, WE AND YOU IN UNIVERSITY LECTURES ACROSS DISCIPLINES

Abstract

Academic disciplines have varied attitudes towards the use of pronominal resources in both written and spoken genres. But most of the studies that seek to reveal these disciplinary peculiarities are largely grounded on written texts. In recent times, however, studies have been conducted using spoken texts such as university lecture, which is regarded the key classroom genre, to support this kind of scholarship. These studies either focus on disciplinary or intercultural variations in the use of pronominal resources. The studies on disciplinary variation are largely from individual disciplines to reveal such disciplines’ attitudes towards the use of personal pronouns particularly I, we and you (tri-PP). While these studies provide sufficient evidence about the use of these pronouns in academic lectures within individual disciplines, little is known about their use across disciplinary supercommunities (DSs): Humanity (HS), Social (SS) and Natural (NS) Sciences. Thus, this corpus-based study investigated the use of the tri-PP in academic lectures from Ghanaian public universities to ascertain how the norms, conventions, and epistemologies of the broad disciplinary classifications influence their use. Antconc, a corpus analysis software, was used to search for the occurrences of the tri-PP and their variants across the three subcorpora. The comparisons relied on frequency counts of the tri-PP nominalized per 10, 000 words (ptw), given that the subcorpora from the three DSs had different sizes. The frequency counts were supported by log-likelihood tests to establish significant differences across the DSs. The study found that, in total, NS employed more use of the tri-PP than HS and SS, suggesting a high pronominal density in NS’s lectures. Furthermore, I, we and you were more frequent in NS lectures than in HS and SS lectures. This indicates that NS lectures have a high degree of lecturer visibility and lecturer-student interaction more than the HS and SS ones. The findings suggest a change in attitude of the DSs towards discourse-internal interaction, engagement and voice. The study has implications for the scholarship on the pragmatics of personal pronouns, disciplinary variation and interaction in discourse.

Keywords

• personal pronouns
• corpus-based
• disciplines
• university lectures
• frequency
• lectures