Writer Identity Realized By First Person In Chinese And English Academic Abstracts

Personal pronouns, as a way to construct writer identity in academic writing, are controversial. Different scholars hold different opinions as to whether personal pronouns should be used in academic writings. In order to guide academic writing of Chinese MA students majoring in English, the author sets native English speaking postgraduates majoring in English as the standard of comparison and uses the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct a contrastive analysis, aiming to explore how different native students and Chinese students construct writer identity using personal pronouns in the graduation thesis. The frequency and function differences between the native students and Chinese students are analyzed so as to guide Chinese English major MA students’ graduation thesis writing.In this thesis,80 English major academic thesis abstracts are collected. Among them, 40 abstracts are from native English major postgraduates, containing 20 in English literature and 20 in English linguistics. The other 40 abstracts are from Chinese MA students majoring in English, also containing20 in English literature and 20 in English linguistics. The author uses the Antconc data analysis software to analyze the corpus from three aspects:disciplines, personal pronoun categories and discourse functions. The occurrence frequency of first personal pronouns and self mention words as third person in the two sub-corpuses is counted.Foreign scholars Kuo (1999), Tang and John (1999), Hyland (2002), and Harwood (2005) have put forward their own typologies of discourse functions of first personal pronouns. Although their specific categories are different, they still have much in common. As a result, the author summarized a typology of discourse functions after analyzing the above scholars’categorization, which is:(1) Explaining a procedure, (2) Stating a goal or purpose, (3) Showing results or findings, (4) Making a claim, (5) Elaborating an argument, and (6) Expressing wish or expectation.The experimental data show that there are significant differences of personal pronouns in academic writing between Chinese and native students, both in frequency and discourse function. Native students tend to use more first person pronouns in academic writing, especially the singular form of first personal pronouns, but the Chinese students use the plural forms more often. What is more, native students do not use self mention device from the third person’s point of view to build writer identity, but students from CCNU have such usage. In Discourse functions of first person pronouns, native students are more likely to use first personal pronouns to elaborate claim and argument while Chinese students tend to use first personal pronouns to elaborate the research results and findings.To investigate the possible reasons, the author gives the following possible explanation in this paper:first, the existence of cultural differences between the east and the west. Chinese thoughts of collectivism may causes Chinese students use the first personal plural forms to express modesty and evade responsibility while Western ideas of individualism make them be willing to use the first personal singulars to express their own views and promote themselves in the thesis. Second, native speakers are already used to writing in English so they are less afraid of making mistakes, and they have less doubt and uncertainty in their writing, which is why they have more confidence to reflect the roles of the author and assume the responsibility of the authors. Third, because of the differences in academic thesis writing education in the west and the east. Stylistics in China tend to guide students to avoid the use of personal pronouns in academic papers so as to be completely objective while scholars in the west have already thought of first personal pronouns as a kind of rhetorical device in academic writing which makes the author identity construction possible.