Different pronouns, same referents A corpus-based study of I, We and You in L2 lectures across disciplines

Abstract

In recent times, studies on I, we and you (tri-PP) in academic lectures have
focused on the L1 context. This paper, however, investigates the
commonalities in the discourse reference of I, we, and you across three
disciplinary supercommunities (DSs): Humanities (HS), Social Sciences
(HS), and Natural Sciences (NS), using a corpus from an L2 context. The
concordance tool in AntConc was used to search for all instances of the tri-
PP. The referents of the tri-PP were identified based on the contextual and
co-textual clues. The study revealed three referents –lecturer, students, and
lecturer + students – which were common to all the three investigated
pronouns. Furthermore, the above referents were also noted to be common
to all the three broad knowledge domains. In a nutshell, the study revealed
cross-pronominal and disciplinary commonalities in the discourse referents
in academic lectures. The implications for the theory of referentiality are
also discussed.