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.