The Use of ''We'' in University Lectures

7/28/2019 The Use of ''We'' in University Lectures

1/22

The use of we in university lectures:reference and function

Inmaculada Fortanet *

Universitat Jaume I, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Roma nica,12080 Castello , Spain

Abstract

The use of rst and second person pronouns is an important indicator of how audiences areconceptualized by speakers and writers in academic discourse. Several grammarians and lin-guists have studied more or less specically this part of the English language. Two of the mostwidely discussed aspects of pronouns are their reference and their discourse function. In thispaper 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 19851987 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 impor-tant results about the use of we in English academic oral discourse, especially related toreference and discourse function. Some of these results seem to contradict those obtained byRounds, whereas others support her research and complement it.# 2003 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The use of rst and second person pronouns is an important indicator of howaudiences are conceptualized by speakers and writers in academic discourse, even inmodern academic English with its very limited repertoire of I, we and you. Inlectures and comparable speech events, they are perhaps specially marked as rheto-rical indicators because, at least in English, levels of attempted rapport and degreesof personal involvement can be traced by, say, the choice of I versus we or weversus you.

English for Specific Purposes 23 (2004) 4566

www.elsevier.com/locate/esp

0889-4906/03/$22.00 # 2003 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/S0889-4906(03)00018-8

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +34-964-229287/729613.E-mail address: [email protected] (I. Fortanet).
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/esp/a4.3dmailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.elsevier.com/locate/esp/a4.3d


2/22

One of the most widely discussed aspects of pronouns, including I and you, istheir reference. Halliday (1994, pp. 309312) considers pronouns as one of thedevices used to create cohesion in English; pronouns, together with demonstrativesand comparatives, give reference points for the reader or hearer to understand aspeech event. Those reference points can be people or objects in the environment, orprevious parts of the text. Among the pronouns that refer to elements of the envir-onment, it is assumed that I and we represent the speaker or writer, and you theaddressee (hearer or reader). However, the referent of these pronouns is not alwaysso clear. As Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finnegan (1999) point out, themeaning of the rst person plural is often vague (p.329) or the second person youis similar to we in being used with different intended referents. This vagueness hasled these authors to state that it is usually left to the addressee to infer who isincluded in the reference (p.330). In the negotiation of meaning that is always pre-sent between the person issuing a message and the person receiving the message oneof the key elements is the reference of the personal pronouns. Among the personalpronouns, the ones that are especially important for communication are the rst andsecond person pronouns for the implications they have for both participants in thespeech event.

Previous research on pronouns has also focused on discourse function. Someresearchers have dealt with this question from the point of view of politeness. ForBrown and Levinson (1987, p. 127) , for example, the use of we including bothspeaker and hearer is identied with positive politeness. On the other hand, one

employed as a substitute for you and I may have on most occasions the effect of distancing, causing negative politeness.Along the same lines, relating the choice of pronouns to the intended creation of

distance between the speaker and the receiver of the message, Kamio (2001) high-lights the gradation of closeness from we (highest closeness) through you tothey, which he considers as psychologically very distant (pp. 11201121) bothfrom the speakers and the hearers territory. However, he goes on to recognize thateven with an individual pronoun, such as we, the reference is not xed and canchange from one example to the next, varying also the degree of closeness involved.Kamio may be right in pointing out the gradation of closeness provoked by the use

of pronouns but only the context can give enough information to tell if the choice of one or other pronoun is related to a greater or a lesser closeness; and sometimes,even a hearer who is acquainted with most of the elements of the linguistic andextra-linguistic context has to ask the speaker explicitly about their intention inorder to understand the message.

Some other researchers have found more specic functions of the use of pronouns.Hyland (2001) , for example, attributes the use of self-mention by research articlesauthors to their intention to be closely associated with their work or to mediate inthe relationship between their arguments and their discourse communities (p.223).He points out the growing preference of the use of I over we specically in thehard science disciplines.

Tang and John (1999) also focus on the referent of the rst person, but using theperspective of postgraduate students academic writing. Following Cherry (1988) ,

46 I. Fortanet / English for Specic Purposes 23 (2004) 4566


3/22

they distinguish three different roles adopted by a writer producing a piece of writ-ing, which can be the referent of I in different contexts (p.26):

Societal role: identities inherent to a person (mother, father, son, daughter,American, etc.)Discourse role: identities that a person acquires by participating in a parti-cular discourse community (lawyer or client in a legal discourse community,teacher or student in an educational environment, etc.)Genre role: specic to a particular genre within the discourse community(writer as a guide through the essay or the architect of the essay).

Although these studies have begun to illuminate the functions of pronouns inwritten texts, none focuses on spoken English. Raising awareness of pronouns inoral discourse may be especially relevant as academic speech is gaining importancedue to the internationalization of both graduate and undergraduate studies. Reec-tive of this new interest is the creation of a specic corpus of academic spokenEnglish, the MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), which isalso helping to encourage its research. The study of pronouns in academic speech isalso relevant given the importance of lectures in the lives of non-native Englishspeakers at English-medium universities. As stated by Flowerdew (1994, p.1) ,referring to universities in English speaking countries, from among the manyinstructional media at the disposal of teachers . . . the lecture remains the central

instructional activity. Flowerdew also points out that researchers in secondlanguage learning consider comprehension as a two-stage process, the rst stageconsisting of purely linguistic processing and the second of application of theresults of this linguistic processing to background knowledge and context(1994, p.9). Therefore, contrary to what students often think, on many occasionsit is not the linguistic skills of the hearers that are a hindrance to their under-standing, but the application of language to real situations, especially difficult inthe case of pronouns, due to their dependence on context. Even for inexper-ienced or novice lecturers or those who are non-native speakers of English it isimportant to be able to apply their language skills to the context with effec-

tiveness and condence ( Gime nez, 1998 ).One of the primary sources of information about rst and second pronoun use in

academic speech is Rounds dissertation (1985) and her two subsequent articles(1987a, 1987b) both from the point of view of discourse analysis and of teachertraining. These two articles have been quite widely cited in journals that are includedin the ISI databasewith 16 citations of her TESOL Quarterly article, and 5 of herEnglish for Specic Purposes article.

Rounds (1985, 1987a, 1987b) analysed the use of pronouns in academic lectures.Specically, her corpus consisted of ve 50-min videotapes of native and non-native English-speaking teaching assistants of mathematics delivered at the Uni-versity of Michigan, with a total of 26,734 words. For our purposes, her moststriking ndings relate to the high frequency of we in instructor speech and themultiple functions of this pronoun in academic talk. She found that, in her corpus,

I. Fortanet / English for Specic Purposes 23 (2004) 4566 47


4/22

we occurred up to three times more frequently than I or you, and that the mostsuccessf ul teaching assistants were the ones that made a greater use of we (1987b,p. 648). 1

Rounds (1985, p. 4655) also presented semantic mappings for the pronounwe. She mainly distinguished between inclusive-we and exclusive-we, as otherresearchers have done before and after her ( Biber et al., 1999; Haas, 1969; Kuo,1998; Levinson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994; Spiegelberg, 1973 ). Inclusive-we includesthe hearer or audience in its reference scope, whereas exclusive-we excludes thehearer or audience from the reference.

For Rounds, however, this classication was not sufficient and she added threemore types of we, according to their referent ( Rounds, 1987a, pp. 1819 ):

we in contexts in which I is more specically marked. For example,We said that . . .The teacher is repeating some previously explained information.

The students are the actual sole referents of we. For example,I want to look at some of the problems we had for today . . .The students had the problems as homework.

we which has as its actual referent anyone who does calculus. Roundsconsidered that this we could be substituted by one ( Rounds, 1985, pp. 54

55). For example,We [mathematicians] call that number . . .

This would be considered an example of exclusive-we, since the hearers, thestudents, are not included in the reference scope.

The third part of Rounds research consisted in dening discourse contexts for thedifferent types of we (1987, pp. 1920). She provided Table 1 ,which shows thereferents, the discourse contexts and other alternative pronouns.

Table 1Referent and discourse contexts of personal pronouns ( Rounds, 1987a )

Referent Pronoun Discourse contexts

Teacher I, we Reporting previous remarks; announcing future actionsStudents You, we Referring to student responsibility; admonishmentsStudents and teacher I, you, we Working with specic examples; announcing future actionsMathematicians and teacher I, we Naming; deningAnyone who does calculus I, you, we Working with mathematical procedures

1 In Rounds research, success in teaching is rated by the department supervisor, teachers are eithergood or problematic based on rst-hand observations, end-of-semester evaluations, and the number of student complaints led with his office (1987a, p. 15) .

http://-/?-http://-/?-http://-/?-


5/22

My rst intention when starting this research was to study the use of personalpronouns in spoken and academic English since they may represent a difficulty forthe understanding of international students who are not used to academic speech,and who may not understand at once the referent and function of certain uses of pronouns. Since Rounds work, no other studies on pronoun use in classroomspeech have been carried out of which I am aware. Thus, her research was con-sidered a starting point for the present study, which focuses on the use of the pro-noun we. She used a corpus of ve lectures recorded for the research leading to herPhD dissertation, and her results showed a very frequent use of the pronoun we,which exceeded the other pronouns, I and you. Today a corpus of academicspeech much larger and more multidisciplinary than that used by Rounds is avail-able, the MICASE, from the same university where she compiled her own corpus,the University of Michigan. Though this circumstance gave me the opportunity of comparing her results with mine, my intention was also to conduct a deeper studytaking advantage of the resources of corpus linguistics now available.

To this end, the following research questions were established:

1. What is the frequency of we in academic speech today, compared with theuse of other pronouns? Is there a signicant difference if the corpus isrestricted to one discipline such as mathematics?

2. In which linguistic contexts does we appear?3. What referents can be found for we in a corpus of spoken academic

English?4. What are the discourse functions of we?

Though I tried to answer all four questions, it was questions 3 and 4 that receivedmost attention.

2. Method

As said before, MICASE was used as the corpus of the present research. MICASE

is, as is stated in its web page, a research database open to the world ( Simpson,Briggs, Ovens & Swales, 1999 ), since it can easily be assessed on line on the Internet.It consists of a corpus of approximately 1.7 million words transcribed from a varietyof speech events at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Recordings andtranscriptions began in February 1998 and are still going on. The speech eventstranscribed are classied into classroom and non-class events. Among the formerthere are lectures, discussion sessions, lab sessions, seminars and student presenta-tions. Among the latter, there are advising sessions, colloquia, dissertation defenses,interviews, meetings, office hours, service encounters, study groups, tours andtutorials. The speech events are related to a variety of academic departments in thebiological and health sciences, the physical sciences and engineering, the social sci-ences and education, and humanities and art. There is also a wide range of partici-pants that represents almost the entire university.



6/22

As established by the research questions, the rst focus of this research was thefrequency in the use of we. For this quantitative study, I used Wordsmith Tools(Scott, 1996) to analyse one of three sub-corpora I established for this studyCor-pus A, which included all lectures and colloquia in the MICASE corpus, up to 75speech events with a total of 770,353 words. The frequency of we, and relatedwords (us, our, us, lets) was compared with the frequency of you and I andtheir related words. Since the results obtained using this corpus were different fromthose found by Rounds, a second search was carried out with corpus B. Corpus Bconsisted of a lecture, a colloquium and a study group transcript, with a total of 28,477 words. Although it would have been preferable to use a corpus of only lec-tures, these were the only three speech events in the MICASE related to the dis-cipline of mathematics, which was the one selected by Rounds for her corpus.

The linguistic contexts of we were also considered as relevant for this research.Using again Wordsmith Tools , the repetition of collocation clusters was analyzed inCorpus A. The results were also employed later to support the discourse functions of some uses of we.

The two most important parts of the research were the search for the referents andthe discourse functions of we. I immediately realized that the applicationof Wordsmith Tools to Corpus A would not help me with these two variables. Athorough qualitative analysis was needed, which required a careful reading of amore limited corpus. For this purpose, Corpus C, with a total of 40,986 words, wascreated. It consisted of four lectures, three of them addressed to students with 40

or more people in the audience, and the fourth addressed to a more limited numberof faculty members. Here is a brief description of the four lectures:

Lecture 1: Education Colloquium (duration: 52 min) (9119 words). In this lecturethe audience was formed by a number of faculty members and, though the rstpart of the transcript is a monologic lecture, the second part is a colloquium withthe participation of eight of the faculty members in the audience.Lecture 2: Intro Anthropology Lecture (duration:74 min) (11,512 words). Thislecture was delivered in an auditorium to 400 students. It was not followed by acolloquium, but there were some questions asked by one student in the middle of

the lecture.Lecture 3: Japanese Literature Lecture (duration: 44 min) (8534 words). Thislecture was attended by 60 students, and up to 6 students from the audience askedquestions and made remarks during the lecture.Lecture 4: Medical Anthropology Lecture (duration: 69 min) (11,821 words) Thislecture was attended by 40 students. In this case the speaker did not keep the oor,but let some students in the audience participate, not only with questions at theend but with remarks and comments during the lecture.

Most lectures in US universities are followed or interrupted by the participation of members of the audience. Audience intervention changes a monologic mode of lan-guage into a dialogue. It is important to know this, since it may affect directly theuse of pronouns, their reference or their function. In the description of the lectures I



7/22

pointed out the participation of other speakers in all the speech events in this corpus.The primary mode of speech in all lectures is monologic, although dialogue is alsopresent in all of them.

3. Results

3.1. Frequency

A search using the Wordsmith Tools Concordancer produced the results in Table 2 .Rounds results were added to the table for comparison. However, her results wereonly given in number of occurrences and it was difficult to establish a comparisonbetween two corpora so different in length. Since the concordancer provided us withthe frequency rates in the MICASE ( per thousand words), this rate was also esti-mated for Rounds corpus. 2

The third person singular and plural were excluded from this analysis since thereferent can very rarely be the speaker or the hearer.

Even though the concordancer could not make a distinction between the usesof you as subject and object, it seems clear from the data that the use of thepronouns I and you individually and collectively nearly double that of we inthe MICASE. The occurrences of the possessive pronouns are more or less

Table 2Occurrences and frequency of personal pronouns

Pronouns MICASE Rounds corpus

Occurrences Frequency(per 1000 words)

Occurrences Frequency(per 1000 words)

First personI 13,827 17.9 301 11.5me 1180 1.53 26 1my 1244 1.6 2 0.1total 16,251 21.03 329 12.6

we 7450 9.7 907 34us 610 0.8 35 1lets 644 0.8 92 3.5our 785 1 18 0.6total 9489 12.3 1052 39

Second personyou (sub & obj) 16,000 20.7 335 12.5your 1664 2.1 3 0.1total 17,664 22.9 338 12.6

2 Since I knew the number of words in Rounds corpus, I estimated the frequency rate, that is, numberof occurrences per thousand words. In this way, all data were comparable.

http://-/?-http://-/?-


8/22

correlative to the use of the personal pronouns as subjects. However, in the com-parison of the object pronouns, us in its full and abbreviated form is relativelymore frequent than me. Although we does not seem to be so frequent in academicspeech as the other pronouns, there were still sufficient numbers to make it worthanalysing.

The results from the MICASE in Table 2 differ most noticeably from those of Rounds, in that the occurrences of we more than triple those of I and you. In viewof these results, a second search was conducted using Corpus B, a selection of speechevents related to the mathematics, the discipline of Rounds corpus. Table 3 showsthe results.

In this reduced corpus the occurrences of I exceed considerably those of we andyou. These results are different from the ones found in Corpus A, probably due tothe relatively small size of the corpus. Comparing them with Rounds results, it canbe observed that apparently the use of we is higher than that of you, as she alsofound. However, it is the frequency of I that is most noteworthy in this table, whichmore than doubles the rate of both we and you, and is also three times the num-ber of Is found by Rounds. We cannot, then, state that the results in the search of Corpus B support Rounds research. It is perhaps not the disciplinary and instruc-tional character of mathematics that encourages a greater employment of we, andan explanation for Rounds anomalous resultsin terms of the bigger MICASEpictureneeds to be found elsewhere.

As some part of the research was carried out using Corpus C, the occurrences and

frequency rates of we were also observed for the four lectures in this corpus. Table 4shows the results.

Table 3Occurrences and frequency of personal pronouns in mathematics lectures in the MICASE

Pronouns Occurrences Frequency(per 1000 words)

First personI 812 30.4me 61 2my 46 1.5total 919 33.9

we 452 14.8us 26 0.8lets 95 3.1our 20 0.6total 593 19.3

Second personyou (sub & obj) 339 11.1your 3 0.09total 342 11.2



9/22

Comparing these results with those obtained in Corpus A from the MICASE,which showed an average of 9.7 per thousand words, the minor deviations in lec-tures 3 and 4 are insignicant.

3.2. Clusters search

The second aspect of our quantitative research on the use of pronouns in aca-demic lectures was to observe the presence of clusters associated with we. Table 5shows the rst 30 clusters Wordsmith Tools provided.

We appears very frequently with have preceded and followed by other words:we have to, we have a, that we have, we have the, so we have, we dont have,and we have, to total 512 occurrences. It is also common to nd the pronoun wewith talk: we talked about, well talk about, were talking about, we talkabout, were gonna talk, making a total of 274. Other clusters that appear near thepronoun we include the verb look, know, can/ be able to, need, going to, etc.Next, these clusters will be related with the discourse functions of we in the fourlectures of Corpus C.

Table 4Occurrences and frequency of we in Corpus C

Occurrences Frequency rates (per 1000 words)

Lecture 1 86 9.4Lecture 2 111 9.6Lecture 3 92 10.7Lecture 4 99 8.4

Table 5Clusters associated with the pronoun we

N Cluster Frequency N Cluster Frequency

1 we have to 106 16 we know that 432 we have a 98 17 what do we 423 we talked about 85 18 you know we 424 we need to 77 19 and we have 415 were going to 76 20 i think we 386 how do we 74 21 and we can 377 we have the 71 22 we talk about 378 that we have 70 23 were gonna talk 359 so we have 65 24 a little bit 3310 well talk about 57 25 a lot of 3311 were talking about 55 26 and so we 3312 and then we 48 27 and then well 33

13 that we can 47 28 were trying to 3314 we dont have 44 29 gonna talk about 3215 we look at 44 30 so if we 32



10/22

3.3. Referents and discourse function

Beyond the analysis of clusters, a thorough study of the four lectures in corpus Cwas undertaken in order to establish, in the rst place, the reference scope we canhave and the discourse functions in which it appears. However, before presentingthe results of this analysis, I would like to point out two main difficulties found inthis analysis. The rst is that in all four of the lectures examined there were a num-ber of occurrences of we that could not be classied. Most times these occurrenceswere followed by pauses and a change of mind of the speaker, who then usedanother word interrupting the discourse. These unclassied occurrences ranged from5 to 7 in the four lectures. The second problem when analyzing the transcriptions of the lectures in corpus C was to identify reported speech. It is found in many occasions inthe form of free direct speech; that is, the speaker quotes the words as spoken byanother anonymous person, but without advising the hearer s/he is going to do so. Atsome other times, the speaker adds a short reporting phrase just before or after thecitation, such as this is what one person explained to me or I heard this quote.

(1) this is what a faculty member told me. we hardly ever discussed anything 3

(Lecture 1)

When there is an absence of reporting phrases, the presence of quoted speech canbe noticed by a shift in the use of personal pronouns towards I or we, in the words

of the reported speaker.

(2) theyve also, individually, changed courses. added new readings, brought inexamples from different countries, they tried to make it more international. and then secondly their pursuing internationalization. part of it because if we didnthave an international program we d be ranked much lower. (Lecture 1)

This type of reported direct speech provides vividness to the speech and can alsobe considered as an informality feature, but it requires an appropriate context andspecial intonation, information which is not provided by transcripts.

Table 6 summarizes the results obtained for referent and discourse function inCorpus C, which will be discussed next.

Though I have just used one table to summarize all the results, these will be dis-cussed separately.

3.3.1. ReferentsAs can be seen in Table 6 , the highest number of occurrences of we was found in

reported direct speech with the same referent, larger group of people (including thereported speaker). The frequent presence of this pronoun in this peculiar type of reported speech can be attributed to the lack of identity of the speaker who cannotspeak for him/herself and must then speak as a representative of a group. In the

3 Underlining means reported direct speech.

http://-/?-http://-/?-


11/22

Table 6Referent and discourse function of we in four lectures from the MICASE

Reference Occurrences No. of lecture

Inclusive we/Exclusive we

D

Larger group of people(including speaker+audience)

78 1,2,4 iofcivtri

Total: 78Speaker+Audience 27 2,3 i

4 1 i12 2,3 i

4 2,3 i24 3,4 iTotal: 71

we for I 41 1,2,3,4 i4 4 i

22 1 e3 2 i

Total: 70we for you (audience) 13 2,3,4 i

Total: 13Speaker+other people 3 2 e

pein

2 4 eco

Total: 5we for indenite you or one 4 2 iau

Total: 4


12/22

Table 6 ( continued )

Reference Occurrences No. of lecture

Inclusive we/Exclusive we

Di

we for they 1 2 espin

2 4 iTotal: 3

Reported direct speechLarger group of people(including the reported speaker)

96 1,2,3,4 eourep

Total: 96we for you 1 4 e

Total: 1


13/22

following example, the speaker wants to illustrate the doctors reaction to the Inuitnative womens behavior when they were about to deliver a baby, and did not wantto move from their isolated villages.

(3) . . .and when folks came in for their check up and they were about three (few)weeks away from their due date (people) would say now, you know we dont want you just waiting too long and going into labor so (as) we have to deliver you here(Lecture 4)

In the example, the introducing speaker says people in a low voice (signaled byparentheses) to indicate the referent of we though from the context it can easily bereduced to doctors.

This use of we is always exclusive, since there is no logical link between thereported speaker and the audience. Citing or quoting anonymous speakers seems tobe often used as a linguistic device of hedging, since, in this way, it is other people,and not the speaker, who express their opinion. Moreover, cited or reported wordsdo not necessarily have to be the real words said by the reported speaker or it mayeven be possible that the reported speech event never happened; what the speakerpresupposes the hearer knows and accepts.

The referent of we as larger group of people (including the reported speaker)found in reported direct speech can also be related to the second most frequent useof we in the MICASE, larger group of people (including speaker+audience),

with 78 occurrences. In contrast to the previously reported use, here we includesthe two participants in the speech event together with other people. In the followingexample, the shift made by the speaker from they to we makes the referent veryclear to the hearer.

(4) . . .humans have come up with m- terms of how to, acquire those things thatthey need, that we need . . . (Lecture 2)

The speakers intention in this case is to involve the audience in what s/he is saying.There is another referent of we much less frequent than the previous ones (only 5

occurrences), which includes a group of people and the speaker, but excludes theaudience. Unlike the results obtained for the previously mentioned use of we, theintention of the speaker seems to be here a detachment from the audience, a dis-tancing between the experts, including the instructor-speaker, and those who are stilllearning, the students-audience.

(5) . . . you always see comparisons of infant and uh and and perinatal mortalityused as indicators of uh just how advanced a country or a community is we use uhthese sort of statistics, as ways to talk about how good things are uh in different places, . . . (Lecture 2)

A second group of referents of the pronoun we includes all those in which we isemployed referring either to the speaker or to the audience or to both of them, but



14/22

excluding other people. I is a very frequent referent of we in the MICASE corpusC. The speaker involves the students in actions s/he can only do, as can be seen inthe following example.

(6) . . .it is because we re going to be talking about it today . . . (Lecture 4)

It is only the teacher who presents and explains the new topic, not thestudents.

Most of the occurrences of we with I as a referent are inclusive; that is, thespeaker tries to involve the audience in what s/he is doing. However, in Lecture 1there is a high concentration of wes with this referent that are exclusive of theaudience. The speaker is talking about some research she carried out some time ago,and she primarily uses I during the lecture, but once the colloquium starts shestarts using both I and we, becoming almost exclusively we at the end of thecolloquium. The shift can be observed in the following example:

(7) S1you know i did not ask faculty about that so i couldnt ask that uh i couldnt answer that in this survey < PAUSE DUR=:04 00 > i wish i_i dontremember all the questions i know_, im not sure we asked that specically

In this example, she starts by using I and nishes by changing it into we, eventhough the verb remains the same. At the end of the colloquium (two last interven-

tions) I has almost disappeared (three occurrences), and we has replaced it (nineoccurrences).I contacted the speaker by e-mail 4 and asked her what she thought could be the

reason for this change of personal pronoun in her speech. She replied that it was dueto the fact that she had been asked about some part of the research she had carriedout with a team of people. However, I believe that although this may be the reasonfor some of the wes in the colloquium, it does not explain examples like the oneprovided above. I think this shift from I to we may be due, on at least someoccasions, to an unconscious resource of hedging, that is, the speaker is trying toprotect herself from the questions and opinions of the other faculty members in the

audience by using a royal we.Another very common referent of we includes both the speaker and the audience.

Obviously, all the occurrences of we with this referent are inclusive. The intentionof the speaker is to express the actions shared by him/herself and the audience in thespeech event, as in example (8):

(8) . . .when we read Mori Ogai, next we re gonna read about that a little bit . . .(Lecture 3)

You can also be identied as the sole referent of we when the action expressedcan only be carried out by the students.

4 Personal communication by e-mail (2 February 2002).

http://-/?-http://-/?-


15/22

(9) what are we missing? Somebody, did anybody think theres something missing? (Lecture 3)

Here the teacher asks the students what they are missing. The logical pronounshould be you, but the teacher has chosen we for his/her question.

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish in the transcribed text if the referent of weis the speaker, the speaker and the audience, or just the audience. It is the verbs usedby the speaker that give the clue to the referent as in the following examples fromLecture 2:

(10) . . .last, week we also heard about a Masai group in east Africa (Lecture 2)

(11) . . .we re gonna see that right now (Lecture 2)

In example (10), it is the students who hear what the teacher says. In example(11), both speaker and audience can see what is coming next.

There are two other uses of we that have you as a referent, which are more specic.In four occurrences we substitutes an indenite you or one. For example:

(12) . . .they start doing this again, which would be like if we were to coughextendedly or hiccup extendedly (Lecture 2)

The meaning is exactly the same if we is substituted by you or one.The second is found only once in reported direct speech, but it responds to a lin-guistic phenomenon commonly found when speaking to children in a paternalisticway, often to scold them. The adult avoids using you to make the sentence soundless strong; moreover, with the same aim, instead of an imperative a question isoften used.

(13) . . .we want to be safe now (dont we ). Put on that cape and out the window you go (Lecture 4)

The speaker is mocking the exaggerated risk warnings on toys and presents whatparents would never tell their child to do, to put on a toy Superman cape and y outof the window.

Finally, we can also refer to they when the speaker tries to involve the audienceand him/herself with a situation not related to either of them. In example (14) thespeaker is talking about the absurd warning labels on some toys. He illustrates theexplanation with an anecdote about a plastic sledge from Toys R Us. When he hasenumerated all the warning instructions in the label, he says:

(14) . . . have we eliminated everything now? (Lecture 4)

From the context, the audience can easily understand that we refers to the peoplein the company Toys R Us. However, it can also be understood as a generalization



16/22

which involves the whole of US society, referring to their behavior, and to their fearof risk.

Looking again at Table 6 , it indicates that 203 out of 328 (62%) of the occurrencesof we are inclusive-that is, they include the speaker and the audience as theirreferent-whereas only 125 (38%) are exclusive, most of them in reported directspeech.

3.3.2. Discourse functionsThough they may seem very dispersed in Table 6 , the discourse functions found in

corpus C from the MICASE can be grouped in two categories: representation of larger groups of people and metadiscourse.

3.3.2.1. Representation of groups. The most frequent category of discourse functionsis that related to representation of groups, which includes the uses of we excludingthe audience found in reported direct speech, and we with the referent speakerand other people, larger group of people, including the reported speaker, the useof we meaning speaker and audience, and we for they. The groups of peoplerepresented range from very broad ones, such as people in general:

(15) . . .lots of people talk of risk risk is is a very colloquial part of the way we talkabout, things that have to do, with health and illness (Lecture 4)

to more restricted ones, such as a group of Masai:

(16) . . .so we go onto the set, and they had kept the Samburu (Lecture 2)

The speaker provides an explanation for this use of we: . . . I w-I was with thembecause I was the interpreter.

3.3.2.2. Metadiscourse. The second main category could be labelled metadiscoursefunctions, as all of them refer internally to the speech event in which they are found.The most frequent of these functions is guide through the speech event. The

teacher informs the students about what is coming next, how what s/he has justsaid relates to what s/he is going to explain, etc:

(17) . . .in terms of reputation we already talked about (Lecture 1)

With this function we can also have as a referent the speaker and the audience:

(18) . . .the idea of making a living will come up again and again today. And um,we ll think about what that means to make a living (Lecture 2)

and you, including the audience:

(19) . . . there are lots of articles we ve already read in the course pack (Lecture 4).



17/22

Another metadiscourse function, which can also be found for we with I as itsreference, as well as speaker and audience, is that of guide through the course ordiscipline. The speaker takes the role of teacher who guides students in theirlearning a discipline. S/he relates what s/he is saying with what has been explainedbefore or will be explained in the future, and also with other subjects, but involvingstudents in it, in this way avoiding an authoritarian representation of him/herself.This function is reected in the clusters search, in which a high frequency was foundfor the use of we know that (see Table 5 ):

(20) . . .we know, we know from history that . . .(Lecture 2)

There are other discourse functions of we in this category that were only foundwith one referent. In Lecture 1, the speaker recounts a research process using wefor I, but excluding the audience:

(21) . . .we asked them to put their department down [ . . . and we got a lot of negative responses (Lecture 1)

Clarication is a minority function of we with I as a referent:

(22) . . . when we say make a living we re generally thinking about (Lecture 2)

Another metadiscourse function is the presentation of a situation. In theoccurrences with this function, we has the referent speaker and audience:

(23) . . .its a timely topic to be looking at what we re doing with the international students, who we do currently enroll (Lecture 1)

It should be born in mind that the audience in this lecture is formed by academics,not students. The speaker presents the situation before going on with the recount of the research process.

Joint deduction is found as a metadiscourse function with I as a referent in

Lectures 2 and 3:

(24) so now we think we know reality. okay we have, we thought we knew (Lecture 3)

In all the examples found of this function we is preceded by so. So seemsto have two important functions in academic speech, one is what Swales andMalczewski (2001, pp. 147, 157158) have called new-episode ags, that is, alinguistic resource used by academic speakers to recover the attention of theirhearers. The second function of so is to express some kind of summativeevaluation or the onset of summation, as also noticed Swales and Malczewski(2001, pp. 156158) . This second function is more relevant for the present research,since so is in some cases accompanied by we followed by a verb. This is supportedby the high number of clusters of so we have (65) that were found in Corpus A, as



18/22

shown in Table 5 , though have is not the only verb that appears with we with thisfunction:

(25) . . .so, we have large-scale agriculture here, where families . . .(Lecture 2)

(26) . . .so, because of [ . . .], we nd that foragers cannot, . . .(Lecture 3)

Finally, there is a function in this metadiscourse category that calls for specialattention: we is used very often, especially in Lecture 3 with the verbs have andget with a presentative function, that is, the speaker uses this resource to introducesomething new to the audience. In all cases, we get or we have can be substitutedby there is/there are. The clusters search support these ndings though only inrelation to have, since so we have comes ninth in the list of the most frequentlyused clusters:

(27) . . ., and we get [ there is] this whole list of names and theyre all equated withthe Japanese syllabary, . . .(Lecture 3)

(28) . . .and that was a problem because we had [there were] three authors for this particular play . . .(Lecture 3)

(29) . . . you know we do have sort of [ there is ] this um, needless gore . . .(Lecture 3)

Biber et al. (1999, pp. 955956) note the parallelism between some existentialclauses with there is/there are and others with have but no reference is madeto the verb get and the presentative meaning of we have/get. Many of theoccurrences of we with this function also have the demonstrative this in thenear context. However, even though the presence of this pattern is supported bythe ndings of clusters, the high concentration in Lecture 3 suggests it may justbe a feature of the personal style of the speaker, rather than a general trend,though this point would need further research.

4. Discussion

This study explored the use of the pronoun we in lectures. The results showedthat, though this is not the most frequent pronoun, it still has an important presencein spoken academic English. We has a wide range of referents that go from largegroups of people to merely the speaker. The discourse functions of this pronounare also numerous and they seem to t into two categories: representation andmetadiscourse.

In terms of frequency, the Wordsmith Tools Concordancer indicated that we isonly used half as many times as other pronouns such as I or you in todays aca-demic English. The corpus analyzed consisted of 770,353 words and was selectedfrom the MICASE. These results are different from those obtained by Rounds



19/22

(1985, 1987a, 1987b) fteen years before. In order to look for an explanation for thissubstantial difference in relation to the discipline, a reduced corpus of academic talkrelated to mathematics was also analyzed. A possible reason for the high percentageof wes found by Rounds, which cannot be validated with the present research, canbe related to recent tendencies observed in academic language. It may not be entirelyco-incidental that during the last 20 years, the use of I has become more acceptablein research articles in a number of elds, very often substituting for royal wes(Hyland, 2001; Chang & Swales, 1999 ), and the same kind of substitution may behappening in spoken academic speech.

As far as referents are concerned, most occurrences of we refer to a large groupof people, of whom the speaker is the representative or spokesperson. Roundsidentied this referent when used by the teacher, excluding the students, as an indi-cation of belonging to a scientic community, and when referring to metadiscursivefunctions and including the audience. However, the most frequent use of we asrepresentative of large groups, such as humans, or members of the Western civili-zation, was not identied. Nothing is mentioned either about the use of we inanonymous direct reported speech.

Other referents already found by Rounds are I (the speaker/ teacher), you (theaudience/ students) and speaker+audience (teacher and students). This taxonomyhas been completed by some other referents found in the present study: speakerand other people, indenite you or one, and they. As can be observed fromthis variety of referents found in academic speech, it cannot be assumed by the lis-

tener that we represents only the speaker and the audience. As Biber et al. (1999)pointed out, it often has a vague meaning that has to be gured out by the hearerfrom the context.

Many researchers have already distinguished between exclusive we and inclusivewe, including Rounds, but no data had been provided comparing the frequency rateof one and the other. The results of this research seem to suggest that inclusive weis more often used in academic speech than exclusive we. Though more evidencewould be needed to make an assertive statement, this result may suggest that tea-chers use inclusive we in an effort of co-operation with the students and exclusivewe to create a distance between the speaker-teacher and the audience-students.

Since inclusive we prevails over exclusive we, it could be said that we is moreoften used as a co-operative than as a distancing device nowadays in academicspeech.

With regard to discourse functions, two categories have been identied in thisresearch: those related to the representation of a group, and those related to meta-discourse. The discourse functions of representation are closely linked to the referentof representative or spokesperson of a group. As already noted about this referent,the discourse functions in this category, despite being the most numerous, had notbeen identied in previous research, such as that carried out by Rounds.

Many of the occurrences of this discourse function happen in direct reportedspeech, which seems a common resource in academic speech. Considering the factthat in all these occurrences it is exclusive we that is found, it could be stated that ithelps to support the distancing effect produced by the use of direct reported speech.



20/22

Regarding the second category of discourse functions, they all relate to the situa-tional speech event, the lecture; or to the global speech event, the discipline:

guide throughout the speech eventguide throughout the disciplinepresentation of the situationjoint deductionclaricationgeneralizationrecount of a research processpresentative have or get

The rst two discourse functions, those of guide, are the most common in all lec-tures analyzed, followed by presentation of the situation, joint deduction, clarica-tion, and generalization. Then, there are two functions that are also very frequentbut are only found in one lecture, recount of a research process and presentativehave or get which could account for a personal style of the speaker. Only furtherresearch would support a generalization of these ndings. Metadiscourse has alsobeen identied in academic speech, even in previous studies using the MICASE as acorpus. Mauranen (2001, pp. 169172) includes this discourse function in what sheconsiders discourse reexivity, or metadiscourse, which is characterized by orga-nizing, describing and commenting on the ongoing discourse, and by guiding the

hearer in the interpretation of the discourse, even though her analysis deals withreexivity, and not with pronouns. This suggests that metadiscourse may identify animportant part of classroom speech, with specic elements of discourse to mark thisfunction.

In the introduction to this paper, the writer roles identied by Tang andJohn (1999) were described. Although this study was made with a corpus of academic writing, and dealt with the pronoun I, I tried to apply Tang andJohns results to the corpus of this research, and found that a correspondencemay be established between some discourse functions and the roles theyidentied:

Societal role: identities inherent to a person. This can be related to thefunction of representing a group of people. Depending on the group of peoplerepresented, the speaker can adopt one or another societal role: American,human, faculty member, etc.Discourse role: identities that a person acquires by participating in a parti-cular discourse community (lawyer or client in a legal discourse community,teacher or student in an educational environment, etc.). The speaker in aca-demic speech acquires the discourse role of teacher when s/he adopts thediscourse function of guide throughout the discipline or course.Genre role: specic to a particular genre within the discourse community. It isadopted by the speaker with the discourse function of guide throughout thespeech event.



21/22

In conclusion, we is rather frequently used in academic speech, though not sooften as other pronouns such as I or you. We can be found with a wide variety of referents and discourse functions and it is up to the speaker and hearer to negotiatewhich of them is used. This negotiation is usually helped by linguistic and extralinguistic clues. These clues, which are easily detected by a native speaker of English,can represent an signicant hindrance for a non native speaker of this language.Studies like the present one help to create a mapping of the use of English in theclassroom not only in order to add to a description of the English language, but alsoto assist non native students in their academic objectives.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor John Swales of the English Language Institute atthe University of Michigan for his valuable feedback and helpful commentsthroughout the course of the research and writing of this article. I would also like tothank Dr. Jane Sunderland from Lancaster University, and two anonymousreviewers of this paper for their constructive criticism, which has improved andclaried my views considerably. The research presented in this paper was funded bythe Generalitat Valenciana (GV 00-065-9)

References

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finnegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English . London: Longman..

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1994). Politeness (1st ed.) 1978. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Chang, Y-Y., & Swales, J. (1999). Informal elements in English academic writing: threats or opportunities

for advanced non-native speakers?. In C. N. Candlin, & H. Hyland (Eds.), Writing: texts, processes and practices (pp. 146167). London: Longman.

Cherry, R. D. (1988). Ethos versus persona: self-representation in written discourse. Written Communi-cation , 5(3), 251276.

Flowerdew, J. (1994). Academic listening . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Gime nez, R. (1998). The ancestors of an oral eld of discourse. In I. Fortanet, S. Posteguillo, J. C. Palmer,

& J. F. Coll (Eds.), Genre studies in English for academic purposes (pp. 297305). Castello : Publicacionsde la Universitat Jaume I.

Haas, M. R. (1969). Exclusive and inclusive: a look at early usage. International Journal of AmericanLinguistics , 35 , 16.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar . New York: Arnold.Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for

Specic Purposes , 20, 207226.Kamio, A. (2001). English generic we, you, and they: an analysis in terms of territory of information.

Journal of Pragmatics , 33, 11111124.Kuo, C-H. (1998). The use of personal pronouns: Role relationships in scientic journal articles. English

for Specic Purposes , 18, 121138.Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics (1st ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Mauranen, A. (2001). Reexive academic talk: observations from MICASE. In R. Simpson, & J. Swales

(Eds.), Corpus linguistics in North America (pp. 165178). Ann Arbor: The University of MichiganPress.



22/22

Pennycook, A. (1994). The politics of pronouns. ELT Journal , 48(2), 173178.Rounds, P. (1985). Talking the mathematics thorough: disciplinary transaction and socio-educational inter-

action . Unpublished PHD dissertation, The University of Michigan.

Rounds, P. (1987a). Multifunctional personal pronoun use in educational setting. English for SpecicPurposes , 6(1), 1329.Rounds, P. (1987b). Characterizing successful classroom discourse for NNS teaching assistant training.

TESOL QUARTERLY , 21(4), 643671.Scott, M. (1996). Wordsmith Tools . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Simpson, R. C., Briggs, S. L., Ovens, J., & Swales, J. M. (1999). The Michigan corpus of academic spoken

English . Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan [ http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htm] .

Spiegelberg, H. (1973). On the right to say we: a linguistic and phenomenological analysis. In G. Psathas(Ed.), Phenomenological sociology (pp. 129156). New York: Wiley.

Swales, J. M., & Malczewski, B. (2001). Discourse Management and New-Episode Flags in MICASE. InR. Simpson, & J. M. Swales (Eds.), Corpus linguistics in North America (pp. 146164). Ann Arbor: The

University of Michigan Press.Tang, R., & John, S. (1999). The I in identity: exploring writer identity in student academic writing

through the rst person pronoun. English for Specic Purpose , 18(1), 2339.

Inmaculada Fortanet obtained her PhDr. in English Philology in 1993. At present she is a Lecturer at theUniversitat Jaume I of Castello , where she teaches English to English Philology, as well as BusinessAdministration students. She is one of the editors of Genre Studies in English for Academic Purposes . Shehas published several papers on Internet English and on academic written and spoken English in Spanishand international journals. She has coordinated the recent publication of the book Co mo escribir unart culo de investigacio n en ingle s, a handbook for Spanish researchers who want to publish in English.Her current interests are in written and spoken academic English.

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htmhttp://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htmhttp://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htmhttp://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htm

The Use of ''We'' in University Lectures

Documents

Transcript of The Use of ''We'' in University Lectures