The Use Of First Person Pronouns In Research Articles Of English Social Science Papers Of Chinese And Nes Authors

English has been considered as the lingua franca of international academic field. So English academic writing, as a result, has become an important channel in academic exchange today. It is one indispensible skill for scholars and researchers who aim to gain achievements in the academic field to write academic papers in English. And as for the academic writing standard, different academic writers hold different points of view, especially in countries where English is the second-language. Academic writers are now still in debate as to whether or how first person pronouns can be properly used in academic writing.In order to get deep understanding about the present situation and the scholars’ level of academic writing in our country, two corpora are self-built in the thesis, and through comparative analysis, the thesis identifies the similarities and differences in the use of first person pronouns in academic writing between Chinese scholars and native English scholars.The research verifies that both Chinese scholars and native English scholars would use first person pronouns in academic writing; the chi-square test results of the present study show that significant differences do exist in the number of first person pronouns used in academic writing. The frequency of first person singular pronouns in research articles by Chinese scholars is obviously lower than that by native English scholars, while the frequency of first person plural pronouns we is far higher in research articles by Chinese scholars. In addition, foreign scholars (Tang and John,1999; Hyland,2002; Martinez,2005, etc.) discussed and classified the discourse functions of first person pronouns in research articles. In this thesis, the author chooses Hyland’s classification of the discourse functions of exclusive first person pronouns, including stating a goal or purpose, explaining a procedure, elaborating an argument, stating results or claims. From the data, we can see that Chinese scholars tend to use more exclusive first person pronouns to perform the function of stating a goal or purpose, while native English scholars favor use first person pronouns in explaining a procedure to promote their paper, and to emphasize their importance in the research. In the thesis, the author gives several possible explanations to these results. The reasons for Chinese scholars’less use of first person singular pronouns and more use of first person plural pronoun we in academic writing are probably that:firstly, the Asian collective culture is deep rooted in Chinese scholars; secondly, the different ideas about the use of first person pronoun in academic writing held by different scholars may have an influence on academic writers; thirdly, different writing purposes also influence the use of first person pronouns in academic writing. The above reasons can also explain the different distributions of discourse functions performed by first person pronouns in research articles. Chinese scholars are used to hiding themselves in academic writing, while native English scholars tend to highlight themselves in research articles.Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis in the thesis, the research reveals the features of first person pronouns in English research articles written by Chinese scholars in Social Science International Conference Proceedings and native English scholars in Social Science International Journals, which will provide some reference to English academic writing courses and can help Chinese scholars to write better English academic papers in the future.