The Use Of First Person Pronouns In Research Articles

As the study of the theories on academic writing reveals, academic articles turn out to be the most important represents of scientific research achievements, which are meant to summarize, investigate and explore the problems in scientific fields as well as to report the scientific results to the academic community. Undoubtedly, academic articles, with its unique writing pattern and requirements, differ from any other genre. It has been widely acknowledged that academic articles serve as the most important, the fairest and the most objective elements in measuring the researchers'academic level. Academic writing, therefore, is getting more valued by scholars. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in exploring interaction in discourse. Simultaneously, some studies have exploited interaction in this specific written discourse---academic articles, and further discussions on its communicative functions have been developed. Some writers skillfully employed various kinds of linguistic strategies such as the passive voice, nominalization, hedges and personal pronouns to achieve the goal of transmitting information and get successful academic exchanges with readers. Correspondingly, personal pronouns became the focus of the research, and more importance was attached to functions of this linguistic strategy ---personal pronouns in academic articles. As all research articles carry information about the writers'originality and individual contributions to the field, first person pronouns are likely to be powerful means for self-representation and self-promotion. Until now, however, we know little about how first person pronouns are used in academic articles as well as the functions they perform in different disciplines under different cultures.The present paper, based on previous studies, presents an empirical study of first person pronouns in academic articles across three disciplines with corpus-based contrastive analysis. Viewing the use of first person pronouns as an effective rhetorical strategy, the author explores quantitatively and qualitatively distribution of them and the functions they serve in a comparable synchronic corpus of Doctoral Dissertations written by native English scholars (NES) based at American and British universities and Doctoral Dissertations written by native Chinese scholars (NCS) based at Chinese universities. As a result, the author sets up two sub-corpora which compose the Introduction sections of ninety articles in the fields of mathematics, education and linguistics. With personal pronoun system under the interpersonal metafunction in Systemic Functional Linguistics as a theoretical framework, the aim of this paper is to investigate the frequency of use of first person pronouns and their corresponding determiners, the similarities and differences lying in the two sub-corpora across different disciplines in addition to the possible relevant reasons. The research is intended to assist researchers and students in academic writing, especially, in the writing of Introduction section more effectively and skillfully.The results reveal that significant differences are found in the distribution of first person pronouns and their determiners as well as the discourse functions they perform in the two corpora. The different results in both sub-corpora suggest that the use of first person pronouns in Dissertations is not only conditioned by the discipline to which the authors belong but also by the specific cultural context in which the research articles are produced and distributed. Besides, the analysis shows that the use of first person pronouns allows the writers to emphasize their own contributions and represent themselves to readers in order to affirm their role in the discourse.