Omoniyi
(2006: 12) points out that “all social actions are separable into moments which
make up the stretch of time it takes to accomplish them”, and we extrapolate
from this the possibility of large and complex phenomena such as ‘community’
and ‘identity’ (useful if largely contested terms), being visible in microcosm in
the moment-to-moment unfolding of spoken interaction. Clearly “social action”
is far more than face-to-face talk, but natural spoken discourse provides rich
data from which to retrieve subtle markers of community and identity. Perhaps
the most obvious ones manifest in talk – essential complexity notwithstanding –
are personal pronouns. Items such as pronouns serve to evoke conceptualisations
of both space and time, but also identity in that they can index social
relationships. We argue that the appropriate and natural use of personal
pronouns is essential to the successful demonstration of community membership. In
order to demonstrate this, we utilise a corpus-based, iterative methodology to
examine occurrences of the pronoun ‘we’ in two small corpora – one of family
discourse and one of workplace discourse. Occurrences of the pronoun in both
contexts will be isolated and categorised in order to determine to what extent
they represent linguistic proxies for both identity and community. What becomes
apparent is that in addition to defining community and identity, through the
construction of in-groups and out-groups, ‘we’ also functions in a more complex
manner in workplace discourse – a context where the community does not share
the same intimacy as a family group. In order to frame the findings of the
empirical study, this paper also operationalises the notion of ‘community of
practice’ (e.g. Wenger 1998) with its tripartite criteria, joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire.