The frequency of we across academic disciplines and registers in MICASE

Introduction The study of the use of first and second pronouns within academic discourse has focused primarily on their reference and discourse function. Previous studies by Rounds (1985, 1987a, 1987b) analyzed instructors’ use of we compared to other personal pronouns in mathematics classes at the University of Michigan, proposing multiple discourse functions and demonstrating a high frequency of we among instructors and successful teaching assistants. Using MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) to expand upon Rounds’ studies, Fortanet (2004) then examined the use of personal pronouns in the corpus as a whole, as well as in a limited corpus containing only mathematics-related speech events to compare her findings with Rounds’ study of mathematics lectures. Fortanet found that the use of we was half that of other pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘you’ throughout the corpora, proposing that compared to Rounds’ results, which displayed a strikingly high frequency of ‘we,’ this difference may be attributed to the growing acceptance of the use of ‘I’ in academic language. These studies raise the question whether the frequency and use of we depends at all on the academic discipline and register in which it occurs. In this kibbitzer, we took a first step towards addressing this question by compiling selective corpus samples of three physical science disciplines and three different registers from MICASE.