Part of
Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse: Perspectives from corpus linguisticsEdited by Julia Bamford, Silvia Cavalieri and Giuliana Diani
[Dialogue Studies 21] 2013
► pp. 33–44
This study aims to investigate how speakers employ personal pronouns (we, you, I) in two types of monologic academic speech, undergraduate lectures and public lectures, through analysis of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Not only the frequency of instances of personal pronouns but also two linguistic environments were examined: words placed before and after the pronoun. The results show both common features and variations in the two types of academic speech. “You” was the most common personal pronoun in both undergraduate and public lectures. Variations seem to be related to the purpose of the speech and the relationship between the speaker and the audience.