چکیده:
Studies on the referents of I, we, and you (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 AntConc 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 I, we, and you 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.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Generally, studies in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) that adopt the tripartite approach seek to discover rhetorical and discoursal choices informed by shared norms and conventions across the DSs. Over the years, scholars have investigated the referents of I, we and you in academic lectures by adopting either the dipartite approach (Yeo & Ting, 2014), tripartite (Plaza & Alvarez, 2013) or quadripartite (Yaakob, 2013) approaches.
Yaakob (2013) used a corpus of lecture-introduction from MICASE and examined the referents of tri-PP across Arts/Humanities, Social, Life and Physical Sciences, and found that I designated lecturer, student and lecturer + student across the four broad knowledge domains.
With the present study aiming to explore the discourse referents of I, we and you in Ghanaian university classroom lectures, there was the need to create a corpus that is absolutely Ghanaian.
g. Fox, 1992; O'Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter, 2007; Sinclair, 2004) advocate a large corpus study, arguing that this provides a realistic representation of the occurrence of the use of a particular linguistic variable, and that small corpora “impose certain limitations on the generalizability of the findings” (Blackwell, 2010, p.
Table 6: We-referents Peculiar to SS {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} The referents discourse-external identities revolving around non-human entities such as political parties, colonized countries, and universities/departments.
Table 7: We-referents Peculiar to NS {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} Consequently, NS lecturers limited themselves to the defined members in the academic discourse community, ranging from undergraduates to expert.