Examining Inter-disciplinary Commonalities in the Referents of I, We and You in Classroom Lecturer Talk

Abstract

Studies have sought to establish the ‘territory of reference’ or ‘patterns of referentialities’ of I, we and you (tri-PP) in academic lectures across disciplinary supercommunities (DSs): Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. These studies are largely from L1 context, and also report on only referents common to the three DSs, without giving attention to those at the interface of two DSs. This study, therefore, is the first attempt to examine the referents of the tri-PP at the interface of two DSs in academic lectures, using a corpus from the L2 context. A corpus of over one hundred thousand words was built for the study, and AntConc was used to search for the occurrences of the tri-PP. Drawing on the contexts and co-texts, the authors determined the referents of the tri-PP. It was found that across the tri-PP, some referents were shared by two DSs. The findings further deepen understanding of the ‘pointing’ role of personal pronouns in classroom lecturer talk and “degree of cross-disciplinary diversity…”

Keywords

• academic lectures
• discourse referent
• disciplinary variation
• personal pronouns