Individualities in the Referents of I, we, and you in Academic Lectures Across Disciplines

Abstract

Studies on the referents of <em>I</em>, <em>we,</em> and <em>you</em> (the tri-PP) in academic lectures across disciplinary supercommunities: Humanities (HS), Social Sciences (SS), and Natural Sciences (NS) are relatively not many. The few ones done limit themselves to commonalities in the referents across DSs. This paper thus appears the first of its kind to investigate individualities in the referents of the tri-PP in university lectures across the three disciplinary supercommunities. A 116, 000 corpus of undergraduate academic lectures audio-recorded from disciplines in the HS, SS, and NS in universities in Ghana was built for the study. The concordance tool in <em>AntConc</em> was used to search for the tri-PP and their variants in the corpus. The referents were identified based on contextual, co-textual and pragmatic indicators. The study revealed that there are referents of <em>I</em>, <em>we</em>, and <em>you </em>peculiar to individual Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. The referents for the tri-PP across the DSs were either metadiscursive or non-metadiscursive alluding respectively to participants in the discourse internal and external worlds. The findings deepen our understanding on the metadiscursive and non-metadiscursive roles in academic lectures, and the “degree of mono-disciplinary homogeneity" (Hyland, 2000, p.10) with respect to the pragmatics of personal pronouns in academic lectures.