Interpersonal metadiscourse in English and Italian university lectures: a cross-cultural analysis of person markers

The paper contrastively analyses person markers (i.e. first person pronouns) as metadiscursive features in English and Italian university lectures. The findings offer evidence of cross-cultural variation in the use of person markers and the verbs associated with them expressing stance. In particular, the results indicate that the use of 1st person singular pronoun followed by verbs of stance is a common resource used by both Anglo-American and Italian lecturers in their university classroom, although frequency differences emerge from the two language corpora. The contrastive analysis has also yielded significant differences in the range of verbs of stance accompanying the pronouns.