A Generic Analysis on 1stPersonal Pronouns in the International Conference Prese

Abstract. Raising awareness of personal pronouns in oral discourse may be especially relevant as academic speech is gaining importance due to the internalization of both graduate and undergraduate studies. Given the importance of lectures in the lives of non-native English speakers at English-medium universities, this paper will present an empirical study of personal pronouns and report the findings on the occurrence and frequency of personal pronouns in the nine conference presentations in the field of environmental science. Personal pronoun is an important indicator of how audiences are conceptualized by speakers or writers in academic discourse.

Key words:Conference Presentation； Personal pronouns； Genre analysis

1.Introduction

In modern times, conference presentations have shown a more varied and dynamic style geared towards the specific needs and requirements of each scientific discipline as a result of increasing professionalism. More and more international scholars and students have the opportunity to participate in international conferences and exchange ideas with famous scholars so that they can keep up with the latest development in research. Even given the opportunity, some of them have difficulty in giving a successful academic conference presentation. As a speaker, on one hand one must claim the significance and contribution of his or her research to the discipline, but appeal modestly to the audiences seeking their approval and acceptance on the other hand in the fixed time. These features of conference presentation are related not only to the motivation of being polite and maintaining faces but also to the complicated role relationships among the speaker, peer audience and the scientific academic community.

Raising awareness of personal pronouns in oral discourse may be especially relevant as academic speech is gaining importance due to the internalization of both graduate and undergraduate studies. The study of personal pronouns in academic conference presentation is also relevant given the importance of lectures in the lives of non-native English speakers at English-medium universities.

2.Relevant Studies On Personal Pronouns

Previous researches on pronouns have focused on written discourse. Hyland (2001) attributes the use of self-mention by research article authors to their intention to be closely related with their work to mediate the relationship between their arguments and their discourse communities. He points out the growing preference of the use of ‘I’ over ‘we’ specifically in hard science. Kuo (1997) studied the use of personal pronouns in Scientific Journal Articles. We can see there is an increasing interest in exploring interpersonal interaction in academic discourse, though most researches on interaction have focused on written discourse.

The use of personal pronouns is central to face-to-face interaction. They usually define or reveal impersonal relationships between or among the individuals involved in interaction. According to Camicittoli (2005), there are a number of interpersonal features involved in managing the speaker-audience relationship and expressing opinions and stance (e.g. personal pronouns and questions), which are now recognized as having a role in L2 lecture comprehension. These interpersonal features can be exploited to engage listeners and establish speaker-audience rapport, thus creating a friendly learning atmosphere. The work of Fortanet (2004) highlights the interactive function of personal pronouns in academic lecture to establish participant roles and to enhance the audiences’ involvement. Morell (2004) found that personal pronouns as one of the interactive features of discourse play a great role in creating rapport with the audiences.

From the above mentioned, it is suggested that the use of personal pronoun plays a very important role in creating an effective learning environment and a great role in creating a harmonious relationship between the addresser and addressee. A successful speaker in international conference must have a good knowledge about the function of personal pronouns in academic discourse. Moreover, the choice of certain personal pronoun for a given context and the presence of a personal pronoun in academic conference presentation can reveal how speakers view themselves, their relationship with audiences, and their relationship with the discourse community they belong to.

However, there are only a few studies exploring the speaker’s identity in the conference presentation. This paper, therefore, is concerned with the use of the first personal pronouns in academic conference presentation in the field of environmental science. We explore the notion of speaker identity as it is expressed through self-reference in the academic conference presentation. In particular, we explore how the occurrences of various personal pronouns reveal speakers’ perception of their own roles in research, of their relationship with audience as well as the discipline.

This paper will present an empirical study of personal pronouns and report the findings on the occurrence and frequency of personal pronouns in the nine conference presentations in the field of environmental science.

3.Methodology

Following the principle that the speakers don’t read the paper word by word in giving a presentation in English in the international conference, we selected and recorded 9 live presentations in the field of environmental science from ‘www.environment.harvard.edu/activities/symposia/2002/video/index.php?&pw=988’ this website totally, and then we transcribed them manually. So, the corpus consists of 9 transcribed conference presentations in the field of environmental science. All of them are given by English native scholars in the international conference of environmental science at Harvard University in 2002.

The study employed both quantitative and qualitative approach, comprising frequency counts and text analysis of nine conference presentations in the field of environmental science. Frequency analysis was conducted to provide quantitative data for the interpretation of the relative prominence of various personal pronouns in the corpus. Moreover, the semantic references and discourse function of 1st person plural pronouns were analyzed qualitatively on the basis of actual occurrences in our corpus.

The search items in our corpus were the first personal pronouns I, me, my, we, us, let’s and our. They were all done manually. The corpus consists of 29,727 running words in total. The number of words in each transcript is on average 3,301. As article length varied among the samples, we equalized the numbers to the occurrences per 1,000 words in the frequency analysis. The frequency of ‘we’ was compared with the frequency of ‘I’. Then the results were compared with Rounds’ Study (1985, 1987a, 1987b) on the use of pronouns in academic lecture, Hyland’s study (2001) on self-mention in research article, and Inmaculada’s study (2004) on the use of ‘we’ in university lectures. Also in order to increase the accuracy, my colleague was asked to help me to analyze the function of 1st personal pronoun in two randomly selected conference presentations according to the discourse functions of personal pronouns in the academic conference presentations.

4.1st Person Pronouns In Conference Presentation

The use of personal pronouns is vital to face-to-face communication for it has the function to reveal or define the interpersonal relationship. Also as a personal marker, according to Hyland (2000), the frequency of personal pronouns can show the degree of explicit author or speaker presence in the scientific discourse. How is it in the oral discourse? The following study will show how the personal pronouns are reflected in the conference presentation.

Table 1 The occurrences and frequency of personal pronouns in our data (total words number 29,727)

Table 2 The occurrences and frequency of personal pronouns in mathematics lecture in the MICASE (Fortanet, 2004)

Firstly, the result shows a higher occurrence of ‘we’ and ‘I’ in nine conference presentations. This result is similar to Round’s study (cited in Fortanet, 2004), which found the high frequency of ‘we’ in instructor speech by analyzing the five 50-minute videotapes of native and nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants of mathematics at the University of Michigan, with a total of 26,734 words. It seems from the data the appearance of ‘we’ is nearly double of ‘I’ in our corpus. The fact that the speaker uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ as he or she is referring to himself or herself, may suggest an intention to reduce personal attributions in that the presentation will sound more objective. The occurrence of the possessive pronouns is more or less correlative to the use of the personal pronouns as subjects. ‘Our’ and ‘us’ is more frequent than ‘my’ and ‘me’. So the high occurrences of ‘we’ make it worth analyzing its discourse function further in the context of conference presentation, where the speaker needs to present his or her own research claims and findings.

In our corpus, the occurrence of ‘we’ exceeds considerably those of ‘I’, which is different from Fortanet’s research (2004) on mathematics lecture. That shows the disciplinary difference of oral discourse. Also the genre of classroom lecture is different from conference presentations. The latter is more formal so the speaker should be serious in taking the responsibility. Also the interpersonal relationship is different: one is between teacher and student; another is among the peer group. Facing the peer pressure, the speaker needs to protect himself from the others’ challenge. So we can state that the use of ‘we’ is one of the strategies that the speaker is trying to protect herself or himself from the questions and opinions of the other faculty members by using a “royal we”.

Secondly, referring to the frequent use of “I” which ranks second in our data, it means that the speaker displays a high level of authority in the context, where ‘authority’ has elements of both its common meaning of “a right to control or command others” and “knowledge or expertise in a particular field” (Tang & John, 1999). Also the various discourse functions of “I” was identified in our study, which can work as the guide through the presentation, the architect of the essay, the opinion holder, and the originator.

Thirdly, the total occurrences and frequency of personal pronouns in the conference presentation is different from the classroom lecture. This is a very obvious difference in our analysis. Maybe in class, the teacher has more freedom with more individual features involved in the classroom lecture. Also this follows the occurrence of ‘I’ and ‘we’ in the data. That means if ‘I’ appears higher, then all the singular personal pronouns is higher. The same happens in a single conference presentation. For example, in CP1 the total occurrence of ‘I’ is higher than ‘we’, so the singular form is higher than plural form.

5.Conclusion

In this paper, a detailed study on personal pronouns was presented. The high occurrence of ‘we’ and ‘I’ in our corpus was discussed in detail. By this study, we realized that speakers must, on one hand, emphasize the originality and importance of their research; while on the other hand, they must humbly seek the acceptance and recognition of their peer audience, and the scientific academic community for the issue of how speakers position their relationship with the peer audience and academic community is well explored in the study of personal pronouns.

In the present academic world, the international conferences are an essential part of the communicative network within the scientific discourse community. More and more scholars and students are encouraged to participate in international conferences and exchange ideas with famous scholars so that they can keep up with the latest development in their research field. Personal pronoun is an important indicator of how audiences are conceptualized by speakers or writers in academic discourse. In speech events, they are perhaps especially marked as rhetorical indicators, because at least in English, levels of attempted rapport and degree of personal involvement can be traced by the choice of 1st person pronouns (Fortanet, 2004). Also the first personal pronouns can be used to create cohesion in English; pronouns, together with demonstratives and comparatives, give reference points for the reader or hearer to understand an academic event. Those reference points can be people or objects in the environment, or previous parts of the text. Limited by the length of the article, the semantic references of personal pronounswill be dicussed later in relation to the discourse function they perform.

6.References

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[4]Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary Discourse: social interactions in academic writing. London: Pearson Education Limited.

[5]Hyland, K. (2001). Humble Servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 20, 207-226

[6]Kuo, C. H. (1999). The use of Personal Pronouns: Role Relationships in Scientific Journal Articles. English for Specific Purposes, 18 (2), 121-138.

[7]Morell, T. (2004). Interactive lectures discourse for university EFL students. English for Specific Purposes, 23, 325-338.

[8]Tang, R & John, S (1999). The ‘I’ in identity: Exploring writer identity in student academic writing through the first person pronoun. English for Specific Purposes, 18, S23-S39.

[9]Thompson, S. E. (2003). Text structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signaling of organization in academic lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 2, 5-20.