doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.1.473
A Case Study of Semantic “We” in Academic Discourse
Zhou Yaru *
,
Zhang Yi
- School of Foreign Studies, Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), Xi’an, China
- Manuscript received August 11, 2023
- revised September 24, 2023
- accepted November 2, 2023
- published January 10, 2024
Abstract
The personal pronoun “we” is the most frequently-used self-mention language of the author’s presentation in academic discourse. This study adopts quantitative and qualitative designs, selecting 60 English academic discourses from the Linguistics Journal of The Modern Language Journal and the Economics Journal of The Journal of Finance as samples to build two corpora. With the help of Antconc and Log-likelihood and Chi-Square Calculator 1.0, the present study analyzes the semantic use of the self-mention “we” in the corpus. The finding shows that there are significant differences in the use of “we” between the academic discourse of the two disciplines from the perspective of between disciplines (p < 0.001), and the use of “we” is more frequent in the economic academic discourse. From the perspective of within disciplines, the use of “exclusive we” is more frequent and there is a significant difference in the use of “inclusive we” and “exclusive we” in the academic discourse of the two disciplines. Finally, the study also analyzes the textual function of “we” in academic discourse, intending to provide some help to the understanding and writing of academic discourse in different disciplines, especially Linguistics and Economics.
Keywords
- personal pronoun we
- academic discourse
- semantic
- textual function
How to Cite
Zhou Yaru and Zhang Yi, "A Case Study of Semantic “We” in Academic Discourse," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1-5, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.1.473
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).