What, which and where: examining self-mention markers in ISI and Iraqi local research articles in applied linguistics

Abstract

ABSTRACTTraditionally, academic writing has been considered impersonal and objective. However, the use of first-person pronouns can have value when used as a rhetorical strategy that promotes a researcher’s claims. This study attempted to identify self-mention markers (e.g. ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘the author’, ‘the researcher’) in sections of various published research articles (RAs). A comparison was made between Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and Iraqi local RAs regarding use of literary devices for self-mention. The total corpus of this study consisted of 64 RAs in the area of Applied Linguistics. A framework of meta-discourse features was used to identify the self-mention markers utilised in the RAs. The AntConc 3.4.4w tool was used to code the self-mention devices found in the selected corpus. The findings demonstrated that the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ was the most used self-mention marker in ISI RAs, followed by the first-person pronoun ‘I’. The first-person pronoun ‘we’ was found most frequently in the Introduction and Results sections of both corpora. Moreover, the findings revealed that explaining procedure and stating a goal/purpose are the most common realisations of self-mention devices employed in ISI and Iraqi local RAs.