Personal power and positional power in a power-full `I': a discourse analysis of doctoral dissertation supervision

This article explicates the specific manners in which professorial power is indexed and implemented in the first personal pronoun `I' in academic discourse. The matter of analytic interest is to find out how the semiotic sign `I' acquires its semantic property of power in the pragmatic context of doctoral supervision. The data under consideration consist of two dyadic interactions conducted respectively by a PhD candidate with her two supervisors in an American university. The data analyses reveal that professorial power may be performed in two different ways (personal and positional) in three types of communicative acts — directive, evaluative, and explanative. The findings here may have some important implications for academic supervision in terms of the relationship between language and power.