A Study on Identity Construction of First Person Pronouns in Academic Papers from the Perspective of Evidentiality

Abstract

The first person pronoun plays an important role in identity construction, however, there is few study on it from the perspective of evidentiality. This paper took the first person pronouns as evidentials, and conducted a comparable analysis on the frequency of them and the identities they constructed in academic papers between soft and hard sciences, aiming to find the differences between different discourse communities and explore their preferences for academic identity construction. The results showed that both fields prefer to use plural and subjective cases of first person pronouns, and they both prefer to construct the authorial identity of “researcher”, but scarcely construct the authorial identity of “responsible person”. Researchers in hard science use less evidentials than researchers in soft science, and they prefer to use evidentials “we” and “statement”, which weaken the authorial identity. Evidentials that embody authorial identity, including singular first person pronouns and “participation” evidentials, account for higher proportion in soft science than those in hard science.