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Chapter 4 Results and Discussion

4.1 Overall Use of First-person Pronouns in Two Corpora

Table 3 demonstrates the overall frequency of first-person pronouns in JA and LP corpora. The statistical result shows that the normalized frequency (per million words) of first-person pronouns used by English native writers (ENWs) and Chinese native writers (CNWs) are 4,440.94 and 3,484.56 respectively, with the latter 956.38 lower than the former, and the difference is extremely significant (LL=314.35, p<0.001). 

The inadequate overall use of first-person pronouns by CNWs supports most of related research on self-mentions (Çandarli et al. 2015; Yang 2015; Walková 2019). However, this finding conflicts with that in the research of Wang and Lv (2017) which presents that English academic papers written by Chinese PhD students have higher percentage of first-person pronouns than international journal articles by ENWs. The reason for the different findings may be related to the corpus sources of the studies. Learner paper (LP) corpus used in this study is composed of complete SCI paper manuscripts written for actual publishing purposes, while those used in Wang and Lv’s (2017) research consist of academic English writing course papers. Writers of academic papers for publishing purposes on international journals may consciously delete or replace the use of first-person pronouns out of the consideration that the subjectivity brought by the use of first-person pronouns may increase the possible risk of being rejected by reviewers or editors. However, writers of course papers are free from these concerns. This difference may help explain the conflicting findings mentioned above. 

Chapter 5 Conclusion

5.1 Major Findings

Based on the quantitative analyses, the following conclusions could be drawn.  

(1) The use of self-mentions in two corpora. We find that the overall occurrence frequency of first-person pronouns as self-mentions in the CNW corpus is significantly lower than that in the ENW corpus. The reason for this difference may be due to the influence of the traditional English academic writing instruction. Specifically, 1) the occurrence frequency ranking of first-person pronouns in the two corpora is the same, namely, we > our > us > I > my > me. 2) All the six first-person pronouns are used significantly less by CNWs than by ENWs (I and my in particular). The less frequent use of singular forms in CNW papers may be closely associated with the influences of collectivist culture advocated in China. Besides, the investigation of the use of I in LP corpus reveals that multiple factors such as writers’ personal preferences, the paper sections, and the writer-reader relationship have effect on the use of I in academic papers. 3) Both CNWs and ENWs are inclined to use plural form (we, our, and us) rather than singular form (I, my, and me) to refer to themselves, which may be explained by the disciplinary characteristics of agricultural science papers in the corpora. 

(2) Collocation of “we” and “our” in two corpora. This study investigates the use of “we + reporting verbs”, “we + modal verbs”, “our + shell nouns”, and “prepositions本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。