Self-mention And Writer Identity In Linguistics Masters’ Theses In China

For a long time, academic writing had been viewed as purely objective. However,over the last twenty years, research on academic writing suggests that it also involvesinteractional elements. Recently, these interpersonal aspects of academic writing,especially self-mention, has been drawing more and more attention from scholars,generating an impressive amount of literature on the subject. Self-mention is believedto be a powerful rhetorical strategy for projecting authorial identities in academicwriting. The focus of previous research on self-mention is mainly on expert academictexts; few studies have focused on EFL learners’ writings. In this thesis, I investigatethe use of self-mention expressions in English-written MA theses written by Chinesepostgraduates as L2writers. This research is intended to find out how Chinesepostgraduates project authors and construct their identities with self-mentionexpressions and whether the way they do it is different from English-speaking authors.The self-mention expressions in the corpus of this research are analyzed bothquantitatively and qualitatively. They are categorized into six different authorialidentities within the framework of Tang and John (1999)’s first person taxonomy andthe first person pronouns are especially analyzed in detail. The findings and resultsshow that Chinese postgraduates prefer invisible author identities because they avoidthose forms like singular first person pronouns, which manifest the most visible authoridentity, and prefer those forms like the author/writer, which manifest the least visibleauthor identity. This is markedly different from the way English speaking writersself-refer: they have been found to use primarily the first person singular pronouns forthat purpose. I attribute this difference to factors such as culture and readership. Thefindings and results of this research are expected to provide some useful advice foracademic writing learning and teaching.