As the
interdisciplinary and mixed methodology turn in corpus research gains momentum,
our attention should turn with more depth to how we interpret our results and
what gives them meaning. As social theories go, the communities of practice model is and has been robust and malleable.
The three foundational concepts around which Wenger (1998) bases the notion of
communities of practice are ostensibly unproblematic from the common sense
point of view: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. It is the latter that
has proved the most fruitful for (corpus) linguists investigating particular
domains of discourse. However, the model has more holistic explanatory value
than that. The community of practice, in common with other social theories of
language such as the discourse community, should only be considered in tandem
with an attempt to problematise all of its underlying concepts, either in
themselves, or in relation to data. When we problematise and, in turn,
operationalise each of the foundational concepts in relation to language data,
the framework gives depth to insights about that data. With this in mind, this
paper considers the pronoun we in two
different discourse domains – family and workplace discourse – in order to
consider both the benefits and limitations of the blending of corpus
linguistics and social theory.