A Cognitive Approach To Seif Mentions In English And Chinese Academic Articles

Self mention can be viewed as a powerful metadiscourse strategy to promote a competent scholarly identity and authority in academic writing, and also as effective means to interact with audiences. A qualitative and quantitative research method is adopted to investigate the distribution and functions self mentions perform in a comparable synchronic corpus of fifty academic articles written in English by native English scholars (NES) and fifty academic articles written in English and Chinese by native Chinese scholars (NCS), all of which are selected from the famous linguistics and language teaching journals (2008-2010) home and abroad. Based on mental space theories by Fauconnier, this thesis sets to testify how scholars use self mentions in academic articles and explore its cognitive factors.The software—Wordsmith4.0is used for investigating the frequency of self mentions and their corresponding collocates, and the statistics reveals a cross-cultural difference among the three sub-corpora. The native English scholars tend to use more singular forms of self mentions, while more plural forms are used in academic articles written by Chinese scholars. The reference of self mention plural forms is vague, depending on the context to decide its meaning. Therefore, the plural forms are classified into inclusive and exclusive use and the functions of the plural forms are explained with examples. Value and role theories are applied to explain the differences underlying the three corpora. As for the verbal collocation of self mentions, studies are carried out in terms of both meaning categorization and tense vs. aspect system of verbs. Based on Halliday’s transitivity system, the meanings of verbs are classified into six categories and the differences among three sub-corpora are testified by SPSS. And further researches have been done on the tense and aspect of self mention verbal collocation to explore the differences and mental space theories are used to explain the functions of verbs collocating with self mentions.The findings of the study show that significant differences are found in the use of self mentions among three sub-corpora. The native English scholars tend to use more singular forms of self mentions, displaying authorial authority and responsibility for their research propositions and findings. Influenced by Chinese cultural and Chinese grammars, the native Chinese scholars are confined to the traditional academic writing models, shy to express themselves, use less self mentions in academic writing. Even so, they always use more context-dependent plural forms to make their viewpoints not clear in their articles, which results in a weak communication with readers. This study will help scholars have a deeper understanding of writer—reader relationship and it also helps Chinese scholars improve their academic writing with the standards of international academic journals.