A Study On Identity Construction In English Abstract Of Chinese Social Science Postgraduates’ Dissertation

In recent years,the study of identity construction has been a hot topic.The language use in specific contexts plays an important role in identity construction.The changeable identity construction in linguistic interactions has been gaining more and more concerns by scholars.But the feature of authorial identity construction by Chinese non-English major students in academic abstract writing has not been explored by now.This research is a comparative study based on self-built corpus on the issue of the use of self-referencing items in English abstracts from postgraduate dissertations and SSCI.45 abstracts of dissertation were postgraduate specialized in management,pedagogy and psychology in 3 universities from 985 project containing 21,816 word tokens;90 abstracts were randomly downloaded from 8 SSCI journals in the same disciplines containing 15,854 word tokens.The research questions are as follows: 1)What are the features of self-referencing items used by Chinese social science postgraduates? 2)What authorial identities can be constructed by self-referencing items according to Flottum’s classification(researcher,writer,arguer,evaluator)in these two corpora? 3)What are the features of authorial identities constructed by Chinese social science postgraduates?According to Hyland’s classification for self-referencing,there are three types of self-referencing items in this research: first person pronouns,third person nouns and abstract nouns.Having searched the frequency of these self-referencing items in the two corpora with Ant Conc,the author used frequency normalization and chi-square test to analyze the results.The major findings are as follows:1)The self-referencing items are frequently used in the two corpora,especially by international scholars.Self-referencing items are used 99 times every ten thousand words by Chinese social science and 137 times every ten thousand words by international scholars.The result of chi-square test is 11.5852,p<0.05.It shows that there are significant difference of the use of self-referencing items between the two corpora.2)Third person nouns are used the least frequently among the self-referencing items.Abstract nouns such as paper,study,research are used much more frequently than first person pronouns by Chinese social science majors.But international scholars are more willing to use first person pronouns to show their personal contribution to their research.Chinese social science majors prefer to use first person plural pronoun we to construct their authorial identity to reduce their authorialparticipation and risk of criticism while international scholars tend to use first person singular pronoun I to construct authorial identity.3)According to Flottum’s(2006)classification theory,this study identified four authorial identities in academic writing which are researcher,writer,arguer and evaluator.After having examined them in the two corpora,the four identities all occurred in the two corpora.Besides,there’s no more other authorial identities found in this research.Writers in both of the two corpora construct their authorial identity as “researcher” most,while Chinese social science majors also construct their identity as “writer” frequently.These findings reveal that Chinese social science major students respect community contribution more than international scholars.While international scholars prefer to emphasize their personal ideas in their abstracts.