Examining Inter-disciplinary Commonalities in the Referents of I, We and You in Classroom Lecturer Talk
Osei Yaw Akoto 
, Benjamin Amoakohene & Juliet Oppong- Asare Ansah
Issue: Vol.2 No.12 December 2021 Article 2 pp. 210 – 223
DOI : https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20212122 | Published online 23rd December, 2021.
© 2021 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Studies have sought to establish the ‘territory of reference’ or ‘patterns of referentialities’ of I, we and you (tri-PP) in academic lectures across disciplinary supercommunities (DSs): Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. These studies are largely from L1 context, and also report on only referents common to the three DSs, without giving attention to those at the interface of two DSs. This study, therefore, is the first attempt to examine the referents of the tri-PP at the interface of two DSs in academic lectures, using a corpus from the L2 context. A corpus of over one hundred thousand words was built for the study, and AntConc was used to search for the occurrences of the tri-PP. Drawing on the contexts and co-texts, the authors determined the referents of the tri-PP. It was found that across the tri-PP, some referents were shared by two DSs. The findings further deepen understanding of the ‘pointing’ role of personal pronouns in classroom lecturer talk and “degree of cross-disciplinary diversity…”
Keywords: academic lectures, discourse referent, disciplinary variation, personal
pronouns
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Osei Yaw Akoto (PhD) is a lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Social Sciences, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He holds B.A (Hons) in English Language and Philosophy; M.Phil. and PhD in English Language, all from the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana. He teaches courses like English for Academic Purposes, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Studies and Error Analysis. His research interest includes Linguistic Landscape, Onomastics, Corpus Linguistics and Academic Discourse. His recent publication appeared in Word.
Dr. Benjamin Amoakohene is a Lecturer at the Department of General and Liberal Studies of the University of Health and Allied Sciences, where he teaches Academic and Communicative Skills. He had his terminal degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Before becoming a Lecturer at the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Dr. Benjamin Amoakohene had served as a Teaching Assistant at the Department of English and the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Cape Coast. He has had the privilege to serve as the Examination Officer and the Acting Head of Department at the Department of General and Liberal Studies of the University of Health and Allied Sciences at different times. His areas of research are Genre Studies, Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics. He is a member of the Systemic Functional Linguistics group, Ghana and the Linguistic Association of Ghana. He is currently the Organizer for the Ghana Names Society.
Juliet Oppong-Asare Ansah is a lecturer in the Department of Language and Communication Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. She holds Bachelor of Education in Psychology and Master of Philosophy in Ghanaian Language (both from the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast Ghana). Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Ghana, Legon, Accra-Ghana. She has been teaching courses like Semantics, Aesthetics of Oral Literature, Translation, Creative Writing, Pragmatics and Akan Written Expression. Her research interest includes Ethnographic Linguistics, Diachronic Studies, Semantics and its interfaces, Language Contact and Translation Studies. Her latest article published by Noyam is on the use of persuasion in Christian fundraising
Akoto O.Y. , Oppong-Asare J.A. & Amoakohene B., “Examining Inter-disciplinary Commonalities in the Referents of I, We and You in Classroom Lecturer Talk,” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 2, no.12 (2021): 210-223. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20212122
© 2021 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Publishers. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
