Writer Identiy In English And Chinese Research Articles In Applied Linguistics

This thesis reports a comparative study which was intended to investigate the notion of writer identity in English research articles and Chinese research articles in the field of applied linguistics as it is expressed through first person pronouns.Based on two self-compiled corpora,namely the ERA corpus and the CRA corpus,consisting of 57 journal research articles in total from the field of applied linguistics,quantitative and qualitative information concerning the frequency,the discourse functions and the semantic references of first person pronouns are presented in this thesis and the writer identities thus constructed.And a comparison shows that articles in CRA corpus differ considerably from the articles in ERA corpus.The major findings are:(1) the first person singular form is totally absent in CRA corpus even in single-authored articles though there are ample cases of self-reference in both corpora;(2) nine major discourse functions are identified and ordered in a cline according to the degree of authorial power.Along this continuum,Chinese writers tend more to show themselves at low-risk and middle-risk functions to avoid making claims and confronting readers directly and personally;(3) writers can use first person pronouns to refer to writer(s),writer(s)+reader(s),writer(s)+others,human beings in general,and the whole community.And Chinese people tend to use inclusive we when adopting authoritative roles such as opinion-holder and originator.In a word,Chinese writers construct a relatively weaker writer identity than writers of English research articles.This thesis also tries to seek some tentative explanations for these differences.It is suggested that Chinese collectivistic culture and social orientation in self-representation are responsible for how Chinese writers behave with these first person pronouns.