Different pronouns, same referents

Abstract

In recent times, studies on I, we and you (tri-PP) in academic lectures havefocused on the L1 context. This paper, however, investigates thecommonalities in the discourse reference of I, we, and you across threedisciplinary supercommunities (DSs): Humanities (HS), Social Sciences(HS), and Natural Sciences (NS), using a corpus from an L2 context. Theconcordance 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 andco-textual clues. The study revealed three referents –lecturer, students, andlecturer + students – which were common to all the three investigatedpronouns. Furthermore, the above referents were also noted to be commonto all the three broad knowledge domains. In a nutshell, the study revealedcross-pronominal and disciplinary commonalities in the discourse referentsin academic lectures. The implications for the theory of referentiality arealso discussed.

“Money Doesn’t Like Noise”

“…Inclusive "we" is used to refer to both the speaker and audience (Kaewrungruang & Yaoharee, 2018). Akoto & Afful (2022) alluded to the traditional semantic mappings "I + you" as inclusive "we", and "I + they" as exclusive "we". The following are some examples of the inclusive "we".…”

I-You Indexicals in Ghanaian Church Music

“…This supports the idea of inter-personal shift, in which a speaker employs alternative pronouns to identify himself (Gibbons & Macrae, 2018). This is referred to as nosismthe scenario in which the referent of 'we' is a single speaker (Maxey, 2016;Akoto & Afful, 2022). It was found that the linguistic resources of the music utilized the nosism 'we' as a kind used for individuals rather than collective speakers.…”

“…Grammatically, 'you' is considered addressee-oriented (Akoto & Afful, 2022). Hyland (2009) has also argued that "you" is the clearest way a writer can acknowledge the reader's presence.…”

“…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.…”