A. Abby Jones
 

            From a linguistic standpoint, high frequency use of first person plural pronoun creates a strong unifying effect between speaker and listener, as it is often employed to do in both political and religious discourse. This paper explores the linguistic and extra-linguistic phenomena of the third person plural pronouns “we,” “us,” “our,” “ourselves” in a ritualized recitation in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The recited material is a section from the fifth chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, the seminal text of AA. The section, entitled “How it Works,” is often read by a random group member at the beginning of meetings, and it includes a brief introduction to the program followed by the Twelve Steps upon which the program is based. Of the section’s 626 words, some form of the first person plural pronouns mentioned above appears 49 times, accounting for 9.4% of the total section.
            In addition to analyzing how these frequent pronouns function in their immediate linguistic environments within the text (as it is recited), I am also analyzing the extra-linguistic services these pronouns perform. Because of the anonymous authorship of the entire AA text, the pronouns in “How It Works” remain unattached to any individual referent—only the “we of Alcoholics Anonymous” mentioned in previous chapters of the AA text. At the same time, these pronouns can also change their referents depending on their pragmatic situations from the deictic function. As a result, the interaction between the recitation and the reception of this passage actually encompasses the ideology of the AA program, as both the speaker and the listeners are inducted into the collective identity represented by the we of Alcoholics Anonymous.