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

Exploring I-You Indexicals in Ghanaian Church Music

“…Personal pronouns, such as "I" and "You", have been studied by various scholars in areas of language use, such as in academic lectures (Friginal, Lee & Robertson 2017;Akoto 2020;Akoto, Oppong-Asare & Fordjour 2021;Akoto, Amoakohene & Oppong-Asare, 2021;Akoto & Afful 2022;Akoto, 2023), speeches (Bennet, 1995;Chen & Hu, 2022) and literary works (Balossi, 2014), because of their roles in indicating the speakers' and interlocuters' level of engagement, commitment, and connection in discourses (Akoto, Oppong-Asare, & Fordjour, 2021a;Akoto & Afful, 2022). In this study, we, primarily, examine the semantic implications of the indexical pronouns, I and You, in Ghanaian Church musicone Determining the reference of "I" involves necessarily ascribing a context of utterance to the expression, namely in the case of "I" we need only determine the speaker of the expression to determine the referent.…”

Different pronouns, same referents

“…Among the available interactive resources are questions, imperatives, lexical bundles, metadiscourse, and personal pronouns (see Friginal, Lee, Polat & Roberson 2017;Lee & Subtirelu 2015;Liu & Chen 2020, Nashruddin & Ningtyas, 2020Sánchez-García 2020), which have engendered the attention of scholars in recent times. Personal pronouns, particularly I, we and you (the triumvirate personal pronouns, referred to hereafter as 'tri-PP') are key interactive resources in academic lectures (Akoto 2020;Akoto et al 2021 a, b). Friginal, Lee, Polat and Roberson (2017, 95) note that 'personal pronouns play important roles in the classroom, as these markers reflect levels of learner and teacher involvement, engagement, and interaction in classroom events'.…”