The use of 'we' in university lectures: reference and function

Abstract

The use of first and second person pronouns is an important indicator of how audiences are conceptualized by speakers and writers in academic discourse. Several grammarians and linguists have studied more or less specifically this part of the English language. Two of the most widely discussed aspects of pronouns are their reference and their discourse function. In this paper I present research on the use of the pronoun ‘we’ in academic speech. I selected this pronoun since a previous study had signalled it as the most frequent in this type of language. That study was conducted by Rounds in 1985–1987 using a corpus from the University of Michigan. The present research was carried out using the MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English), also from the University of Michigan. This paper reveals important results about the use of ‘we’ in English academic oral discourse, especially related to reference and discourse function. Some of these results seem to contradict those obtained by Rounds, whereas others support her research and complement it.