“I/we believe that…”: Establishing Author’s Stance in English Literature and Linguistics Articles

Abstract

The current study investigates the establishment of the author’s stance towards writing through the employment of first-person pronouns in English literature and linguistics research papers. The significance of the writer's position in academic writing has attracted considerable attention as a result of its influence on the tone, credibility, and level of reader engagement. The prime focus of this study is to analyze a corpus of scholarly publications from two different disciplines in order to identify the similarities and differences in the employment of personal pronouns and determiners by authors to establish their position within their academic articles. The study included both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine the data. Corpus analysis was used, and the theoretical framework of Biber et al. (1999) was implemented to categorize first-person pronouns grammatically. The results of the study indicated that the writers on the subject of linguistics had a greater frequency of employing specific pronouns and determiners. These linguistic choices may reflect adherence to writing rules relevant to the discipline, personal writing preferences, or an emphasis on collaborative authorship and objectivity.