A corpus-based study of disciplinary identity in economics lectures: Combining corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics and discourse-historical approach

Abstract

Abstract

This study investigates how economics instructors construct disciplinary identity in the neglected register of the university lecture. Corpus Linguistics (CL) describes statistically salient features, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) interprets their clausal function, and the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) explains them as identity strategies embedded in the field's epistemology. It tracks the markers I, we, you, economist(s) and economics , their process configurations and the salient semantic domains of each subcorpus across 288 lectures (≈1.83 million tokens) from elite universities and open online course series. Three findings emerge. First, the markers fall on three distributional planes: pronouns are densest in evaluative and applied subfields, whereas economics and economist(s) co-vary closely ( r = 0.85) and peak in foundational courses, where the field must still be defined and its practitioners introduced. Second, they realise a three-way grammatical division of labour: pronouns co-occur across mental, material, verbal and relational processes, casting instructor and student as thinker, doer, sayer and identifier; economist(s) with verbal and mental processes (43% and 28% of subject-position cases); and economics with relational processes (76%), abstracting the field as an entity that is , not an actor that does . Third, in the three subfields examined for epistemic modulation, what distinguishes them is less the content of claims than the force with which they are made. Tracing the recontextualisation of labels such as the dismal science further shows how the lecture socialises novices into the insider-outsider boundary.