Authorial presence in research article abstracts: A diachronic investigation of the use of first person pronouns

Abstract

Due to the paucity of attention to research article (RA) abstracts, particularly from a diachronic perspective, this study investigates the changes in the representation of authorial presence through first person pronouns in RA abstracts, with data sampled from four applied linguistics journals between 1990 and 2019. The findings indicate that the representation of authorial presence tends to be shaped by the number of authors. Overall, co-authors intrude into their abstracts more frequently than single authors. In the most recent two decades, single authors are inclined to project their author persona as individuals. However, in the 2010s, both types of authors tend to conceal their presence in abstracts through less frequent use of personal pronouns. The two overwhelmingly recurrent pronouns we and I performed eight discourse functions, among which low-stakes ones (functions that run relatively low risk of exposing authors to readers’ attacks or challenges) have been favored over high-stakes ones (functions that run relatively high risk of exposing authors to readers’ attacks or challenges). The most recurrent low-stakes function of “Organize the text” and “Describe methods” both exhibit significant diachronic variations in their occurrence in co-authored abstracts, with the former overall increasing while the latter steadily declining. However, no significant variations are observed in the occurrence of these two low-stakes functions in single-authored abstracts. The dominant high-stakes function “State opinions” displays opposite diachronic patterns in its incidence in co-authored and single-authored abstracts -- downward and upward respectively.