A Comparative Study On The Use Of First Person Pronouns In Chinese And International English Academic Writing

First person pronouns in research articles (RAs) have experienced several periods in foreign countries. In the beginning, most scientific articles are written in the form of letters, by which researchers can communicate with each other. Therefore, first person pronouns in scientific articles are universal. Later, because research begin to pay more attention on the objectivity on RAs as the result of the development of science and technology, researchers rarely use first person pronouns in RAs. In modern times, the increasing number of RAs leads researchers to promote their own RAs by using first person pronouns to claim the significance and contribution of their RAs. Compared to foreign countries, Chinese research on academic writing starts late. Meanwhile, researchers hold different opinions whether first person pronouns should be used in academic writing. Those facts can make influence on postgraduates'use of first person pronouns when they write M.A. theses. In order to get deep understanding about first person pronouns in M.A. theses, the present study builds two corpora: one is M.A. theses written by Chinese linguistic postgraduates, and the other is RAs published in Journal of Second Language Writing. After comparison, we can find the similarity and differences between authoritative RAs and Chinese M.A. theses on the use of first person pronouns.From experts'classification (Hyland, 2002; Molino, 2010; Luzn, 2009) on the function of first person pronouns in academic writing, we can find similarities and differences among those functions. The classification that I chose is the one from (Luzn, 2009) . He divides first person pronouns into nine functions: stating goals or purposes, stating conclusions, expressing final recommendation, guiding the reader through the text, recounting the research process, showing results or findings, assuming shared experiences/knowledge, goals, beliefs, emphasizing or calling the reader's attention, and expressing opinion or volition. Quantitatively, the statistic data show that significant difference exists in the use of first person pronouns (I, we, my and me) from the M.A. theses and the published RAS. The data also show that the number of first person singular pronouns in M.A. theses is lower, while, the number of first person plural pronoun we is far higher than RAs. Qualitatively, the postgraduates favor to put a large number of first person pronouns on the function of guiding the reader through the text to shorten the distance between themselves and readers, while native experts tend to use more first person pronouns on recounting the research process to promote their paper, and to emphasize their importance to the research as well.I make several possible explanations according to the results. The reasons for the underuse of first person singular pronouns but overuse of first person plural pronouns in M.A. theses are probably that: firstly, Asian collective culture is deeply rooted in Chinese postgraduates; secondly, their writing purpose does not need them to promote themselves; thirdly, a lack of confidence as an academic writer also reduce the number of their use of first person pronouns; lastly, conflicting ideas that some tutors and text books encourage students to use first person pronouns but some advise them to avoid using them in academic writing. The above reasons can also explain the function distribution of first person pronouns in their theses. NES researchers tend to highlight themselves in RAs, but postgraduates are used to hiding themselves in academic writing.