Use Of First-person Pronouns Research Articles

CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF FIRST-PERSON PRONOUN IN NIKI’S SONG

This study aims to analyze the use of first-person pronouns in NIKI's song lyrics, focusing on their frequency, pattern, and context of usage. The research employs a descriptive qualitative-quantitative approach, combining corpus analysis with contextual interpretation. The data consists of song lyrics from NIKI's albums and popular tracks, formatted into a compatible text file (.txt) for analysis using AntConc software version 4.3.1. Data collection involved gathering lyrics from reliable sources, cleaning the data, and preparing it for analysis. The analysis process included identifying the frequency of first-person pronouns, observing distribution patterns through the concordance feature, and interpreting the context and meanings of pronoun usage. The findings reveal a dominance of the pronoun "I" (589 occurrences) over "We" (138 occurrences), indicating a focus on individual experiences and emotions in NIKI's lyrics. The study identifies various patterns, including "I + to be," which reflects deep emotional states, self-reflection, and regret; "I + modal," which conveys feelings and desires; and "I + verb," which directly expresses actions and emotions. Additionally, the "We" patterns, such as "We + To Be" and "We + Modal," illustrate collective experiences, possibilities, and relationship dynamics. The results highlight the contrasting roles of individual and collective perspectives in NIKI’s songwriting, enriching the emotional depth of her lyrics.

Syntactic and Rhetorical Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inaugural Speech at Washington D.C.

Inaugural speech is the first chance for a president to engage the public in new strategies for success. Every inaugural speech is an example of the aims and objectives of the future. As president of America, Joe Biden has faced many challenges, including foreign affairs, a poor economy due to COVID-19, and, most importantly, American unity. The focus of the present investigation is to lead a stylistic examination from the viewpoint of syntax and rhetoric on Joe Biden's inaugural speech in Washington,D.C., on January 21, 2021. The researchers discovered that the speech is full of rhetorical and syntactic devices. The analysis revealed that the speech emphasized on unity and solidarity to preserve and promote American Identity through the excessive use of First-person pronouns and planned use of similes, repetitions, modality and conjunction. In this way, Biden made his speech productive and readily revealed his plans and motives to his audience.

Authoritative and epistemic stance in the construction of conspiracy theories: A case study

What is central to conspiracy theories is the revelation of a hidden or manipulated truth. In addition, the speaker/writer who believes in a conspiracy theory and shares their views on it also seeks the listener’s/reader’s adhesion to the theory. As a result, the speaker/writer must solve two problems: first, the version in which they believe has to be perceived as plausible by the audience and, second, the speaker/writer must have, or gain, credit in order to appear credible. These two aspects are somewhat subsumed under what Biber and Hyland, among others, refer to as stance and stance-taking, which correspond to the positioning of a locutor towards viewpoints and interlocutors. In order to analyze these aspects and the relations between the linguistic markers and the discursive strategies (pragmatic, argumentative, or rhetoric), this study is based on a corpus analysis of online articles written by Jon Rappoport, an unequivocal conspiracy theorist. I only focus on plausibility hedges and certainty boosters so as to study the marking of authoritative and epistemic stance in his discourses and the function(s) they perform. The results show that both plausibility hedges and certainty are used to legitimize Rappoport’s theories and strengthen his authority in various ways, depending on the devices used. Plausibility hedges are mainly used to voice a dissenting interpretation of reality, presented as a possibility that cannot be ruled out, and downplay the elite’s viewpoints. Certainty boosters are used to express the author’s confidence and commitment towards his theories, by presenting his interpretation of reality as unquestionable, self-evident or consensual. Finally, the use of first-person pronouns and booster or hedge verbs are also used to strengthen the legitimacy of the theories and the authority of the author by explicitly indicating his contribution to the construction of conspiracy theories or to introduce and support a dissident viewpoint.

In help-seekers' shoes: First-person pronouns entitled charitable fundraising campaigns and individual donating behavior in China

Both first-person and third-person pronouns are widely used in charitable fundraising campaigns, but which type of pronouns is more effective in soliciting donations is still to be explored. In this study, we conduct a field study and five experiment studies to examine the effect of personal pronouns (first-person vs. third-person) entitled charitable fundraising campaigns on viewers' donations and its underlying mechanisms. We find robust results to show that, compared to third-person pronouns, adopting first-person pronouns (both singular and plural) in the title of charitable fundraising campaigns significantly increases viewers' donating willingness and behavior. Viewers' perceived self-other overlap acts as an important mediating mechanism: using first-person pronouns in the title of charitable fundraising campaigns first increases viewers' sense of self-other overlap, which in turn promotes their donating behavior. In addition, viewers' thinking style seems to bend the relationships between the use of first-person pronouns and both perceived self-other overlap and donating behavior in such way that individuals with emotional-thinking style (vs. rational-thinking style) experience stronger self-other overlap and demonstrate higher level of donating willingness when a charitable campaign is named in first-person pronouns other than in third-person pronouns. These findings contribute to the literature on charity marketing, personal pronouns and metaphor representation, and have substantial practical implications.

Trauma Isn’t One Size Fits All: How Online Support Communities Point to Different Diagnostic Criteria for C-PTSD and PTSD

ABSTRACT Reddit has provided rich data on mental health discourse. The present study uses 40,335 online posts from Reddit communities to investigate how language can contribute to the understanding of PTSD and C-PTSD. The results showed distinct language patterns in the use of first-person pronouns, cognitive processing, and emotion words, suggesting that they are separate disorders with different effects on survivors. Further, while some social media studies have differentiated submissions and comments, few have investigated the language changes between these contexts. Post-hoc results showed a clear distinction between two contexts across several linguistic markers. Discussion and future directions are explored.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mandela’s ‘I am Prepared to Die’ Speech: Insights into Language of Transformational Leadership

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to analyze Mandela’s ‘I am Prepared to Die’ speech and identify the transformational leadership qualities demonstrated by Mandela. The analysis considers the speech's vocabulary, grammar, structure, and genre. The analysis reveals that Mandela exhibited the key characteristics of transformational leaders, including individualized consideration, inspirational motivation, idealized influence, and intellectual stimulation. Through his use of language and grammar, Mandela is portrayed as a strong, capable, devoted, fair, and responsible leader. The use of singular and plural first-person pronouns demonstrates Mandela's leadership qualities which include honesty, reliability, inclusion, and courage to speak the truth. It also highlights his ability to influence, inspire, motivate, and adapt to changing circumstances. Mandela employs transformational tactics to not only transform values, goals, and lives but also to persuade others through his actions, motivate by his vision, and establish challenging goals. In terms of genre and structure, the introduction effectively grabs the audience's attention with a startling statement and a clear thesis statement outlining key issues. The conclusion sums up the speech and ends up with a strong and powerful clincher, which gives the speech its well-known title. The body of the speech was packed with facts and details that were presented in a coherent and organized manner using narrative, descriptive, expository, definition, process, compare and contrast, argumentative, persuasive, cause and effect, classification, and critical analysis styles. The study reveals that Mr. Mandela manages to deftly use these styles to establish his credibility and reliability as a transformational leader, on the first hand, and well serve the purposes of the speech, on the other hand.

Clinical and computational speech measures are associated with social cognition in schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

In this study, we compared three domains of social cognition (emotion processing, mentalizing, and attribution bias) to clinical and computational language measures in 63 participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Based on the active inference model for discourse, we hypothesized that emotion processing and mentalizing, but not attribution bias, would be related to language disturbances. Clinical ratings for speech disturbance assessed disorganized and underproductive dimensions. Computational features included speech graph metrics, use of modal verbs, use of first-person pronouns, cosine similarity of adjacent utterances, and measures of sentiment; these were represented by four principal components. We found that higher clinical ratings for disorganized speech were predicted by greater impairments in both emotion processing and mentalizing, and that these relationships remained significant when accounting for demographic variables, overall psychosis symptoms, and verbal ability. Similarly, a computational speech component reflecting insular speech was consistently predicted by impairment in emotion processing. There were notable trends for computational speech components reflecting underproductive speech and decreased content-rich speech predicting mentalizing ability. Exploratory longitudinal analyses in a small subset of participants (n=17) found that improvements in both emotion processing and mentalizing predicted improvements in disorganized speech. Attribution bias did not demonstrate strong relationships with language measures. Altogether, our findings are consistent with the active inference model of discourse and suggest greater emphasis on treatments that target social cognitive and language systems.

Psychological Discursiveness in Language Use of Imran Khan's Speech on National Issues

The aim of the present study is to understand psychological discursiveness in the speech delivered by former Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan on national issues. In this study, cognitive (schematic) and linguistic analysis are hybridized at lexical, syntactic and pragmatical levels to find out the results. The study is mixed in its nature and there have been utilized Atomistic Morphological Analysis Method, Syntactic Analysis (Jegede, 2020) and Cognitive Pragmatic Communication Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 2004). Frequent use of first-person pronouns, declarative sentences and other utterings denotes that the speaker is intended to keep the speech relevant to the aspects like power, hegemony and ideology. Furthermore, cognitive linguistic analysis reveals that the speaker is determined to present his agenda as positive ourselves and negative other-selves for the promotion of his own hegemonic agenda which is wrapped in the ideology.

POWER THROUGH THE USE OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN E-MAIL INTERACTIONS OF PEDOPHIL: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

This study examines the choice of personal pronouns made by pedophiles in interactions in e-mail. The main focus of this study is to determine who is downloaded by the two pedophiles, namely JON and ZEE when using personal pronouns and compare the use by the two pedophiles. The data of this research is in the form of conversations involving both pedophiles in interactions in electronic mail. Data collection is done through non-participating observation techniques which are suitable for observing activities that are not possible to be involved in. The data obtained from observations in the form of screenshots of the conversations of the two pedophiles in the telegram group were then stored in the data folder. The analysis of the use of personal pronouns in this study uses Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA) dimension model in the form of description, interpretation, and explanation. The results showed that the use of personal pronouns in the interaction of the two pedophiles in electronic mail had a significant difference. The findings of this study indicate that the perpetrators of ZEE crimes use the words of the first and third people which are the most dominant compared to the perpetrators of JON crimes. The dominance of the use of first person pronouns by criminals as evidenced by the use of the words I, I, and we. For the use of the second person pronouns used in the form of you, while the use of the third person pronouns in the form of he and they. The conclusion of this study is that using personal pronouns in pedophile interactions in electronic mail has power in various forms

A Comparative Analysis of the use of First-Person Pronouns in Chinese and Thai

In modern Chinese, the use of first-person pronouns has gone through a process from complex to simple, and finally mainly uses “我”. However, although the first-person pronouns in Thai have also undergone historical development, they are diversified in forms and complicated in use. Different words are often used according to the differences in the speaker’s age, social status, gender and so on. From the perspective of morphology, singular and plural, and grammatical comparison, this paper takes the first-person pronouns as the discussion object, aiming to summarize and compare the similarities and differences of first-person pronouns between Chinese and Thai. Such different use of personal pronouns has certain theoretical significance and reference value for cross-cultural language communication.

Linguistic Indicators of Psychopathy and Malignant Narcissism in the Personal Letters of the Austrian Killer Jack Unterweger

Forensic authorship profiling aims to extract socio-demographic information about the authors of anonymous texts based on linguistic features found in their written texts. One aspect of such a profile that is not usually considered is an analysis of the author’s personality traits. The present study intends to provide a starting point for research into this area. This will be achieved through the investigation of linguistic features reflective of the conditions of psychopathy and malignant narcissism in 14 personal letters of the killer Jack Unterweger. Previous research in the field of psychology has largely examined “psychopathic” and “narcissistic” language in spoken conversations rather than written ones, or in texts produced for the respective study rather than in naturally occurring texts. The findings of the present study thus diverge from previous findings in some aspects (e.g., the use of first-person pronouns), while they provide support for others (e.g., the incoherence of thoughts and changes in topics).

A Comparative Study on the Use of First-Person Pronouns in Ten International Diplomatic Speeches

This paper explores how world leaders use first-person pronouns in diplomatic speeches as a case study on how stance is communicated in high-stakes situations. The dataset comprises ten speeches to security and the economy given by heads of state/governments to their counterparts at international conferences/summits. The data were analysed from a quantitative/corpus-linguistic perspective using AntConc (Anthony, 2021) to summarise general patterns of personal pronoun use and then from a qualitative/discourse-analytical perspective, identifying specifically related examples for more detailed interpretation in context. The contextual features considered for the critical discourse analysis were gender, ideology, and the political systems of the speaker’s country. The results showed that most lead favoured the plural first-person pronoun “we” over the singular “I”. This was especially marked for the Middle Eastern leaders in the sample. The plural form was used for two main functions: (i) audience-inclusivity, referring to the audience of delegates/attendees, and (ii) audience-exclusivity, referring to the nation represented by the speaker. The distribution of these functions in the individual speeches varied greatly, ranging from extreme inclusive use (85%; Temer [Brazil]) to extreme exclusive use (65%; Putin [Russia]); this was largely predictable based on the speaker’s role at the event (e.g., facilitator vs dissenter from a consensus view) and the level of perceived national power. “I” was found to be used mostly at the beginning of the speeches to extend gratitude to the organisers. However, it was often deployed to increase the speaker’s self-dedication throughout an address. Similarly, whereas deployed throughout the speeches to establish a sense of communal rapport between the audience and the speaker. The evidence does not suggest any major differences in the usage of first-person pronouns based on gender, as shown by similarities in the speeches of German Chancellor Merkel and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Hasina.

Perception of eye contact, self-referential thinking and age.

Increased thinking about one's self has been proposed to widen the gaze cone, that is, the range of gaze deviations that an observer judges as looking directly at them (eye contact). This study investigated the effects of a self-referential thinking manipulation and demographic factors on the gaze cone. In a preregistered experiment (N=200), the self-referential thinking manipulation, as compared to a control manipulation, did not influence the gaze cone, or the use of first-person pronouns in a manipulation check measuring self-referential processing. This may indicate a failure of the manipulation and participants' lack of effort. However, participants' age was significantly correlated with both measures: older people had wider gaze cones and used more self-referring pronouns. A second experiment (N=300) further examined the effect of the manipulation and demographic factors on self-referential processing, and the results were replicated. These findings may reflect age-related self-reference and positivity effects.

AUTHORIAL PRESENCE IN SERBIAN AND ENGLISH COAUTHORED SOCIAL SCIENCE ARTICLES

This paper examines the means by which authors’ presence in co-authored articles is signaled directly in Serbian and international research articles belonging to social sciences and written in English by Serbian and native English speakers respectively. By comparing 15 Serbian and 11 international articles, the study tested the hypothesis that Serbian authors avoid the use of first-person pronouns in order to demonstrate authorial modesty, compared to English-speaking authors, whose direct usage of the first-person plural was expected to occur regularly. Additional research questions asked were about the discourse functions performed by first-person plural pronouns referring to the co-authors of the texts, as well as the use of the inclusive/exclusive we by the two examined groups. The results showed that Anglo-American authors use considerably more first-person pronouns in their research articles, although their placement in separate article sections had a similar pattern in both groups. According to Dontcheva-Navratilova’s (2013) taxonomy, the two dominant discourse functions performed by the authorial we were those of the recounter of the research process and the opinion-holder, although with their order switched between the groups. Finally, neither group used the inclusive we to a great extent, except for the Intro+Lit section of the papers, where its inclusion in the text grew up to 52.5% in the Sr group, but only 23% in the AnAm group. These results suggest that cultural practices in establishing authorial presence between Serbian and Anglo-American writers may be closer than previously thought.

Investigating the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance: a signaling theory perspective

PurposeThis study examines the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance. Drawing on signaling theory, the authors investigate how funding-related signals (funding goal and duration), story-related signals (text length, text sentiment, and use of first-person pronouns), and donor-related signals (donor identity disclosure) affect medical crowdfunding performance.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyzed the data of 754 medical crowdfunding projects collected from the Qingsongchou platform in China to test the proposed model.FindingsThe empirical findings reveal that both funding goal and funding duration exhibit a U-shaped relationship with crowdfunding performance. Additionally, the authors find evidence that story text length and donor identity disclosure are positively related to crowdfunding performance, whereas the use of first-person pronouns is negatively related to crowdfunding performance.Originality/valueThis study extends the understanding of the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance through the signaling theory. Specifically, this study provides new insights into the roles of funding goal and funding duration in predicting medical crowdfunding performance and identifies several new predictors of crowdfunding performance, including the use of first-person pronouns in project story text and donor identity disclosure.

A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Chief Executive Officer Statements in Annual Reports and Corporate Social Responsibility Reports.

This study presents a corpus-based comparison of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) statements between annual reports and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Using a corpus of 209 CEO statements from annual reports and CSR reports of Chinese companies, this study employs the Discourse-Historical Approach of critical discourse analysis to investigate the nomination strategies and key topics in these two related reports. The results showed that corporate leaders tend to have different priorities in annual reports and CSR reports. In annual reports, corporate leaders highlight the economic and pragmatic concerns of stakeholders to create a professionally capable and objective corporate image. In CSR reports, corporate leaders highlight the ethical concerns of stakeholders to create a socially responsible corporate image and adopt a more engaging and affiliative voice through the use of first-person pronouns. This study has significance in understanding the differences in the related genres of annual reports and CSR reports for the stakeholders.

Linguistic changes in the transition from summaries to abstracts: The case of the Journal of Experimental Medicine

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A DIACHRONIC STUDY OF THE AUTHORIAL IDENTITY IN TOURISM RESEARCH ARTICLES

The use of first-person pronouns (I, we) in writing research articles was remaining problematic for both inexperienced and advanced authors. Nevertheless, some research suggested that the FPPs were increasingly used in writing research articles (RAs) to indicate the authorial identity. This research aimed to investigate types, functions, and correlation of the FPPs in tourism RAs by employing the diachronic corpus linguistics method. The data of this research were accessed and downloaded through five open access journals published by Elsevier. There were 80 selected tourism RAs from the year 2015 to 2020 that classified into five corpora. AntConc was software that was employed to retrieve the FPPs from the corpora. This research discovered the FPPs I and we were constructed as six types of authorial identity that range from the least to the strongest authoritative identity in the past five years. The constructed authorial identity had three main functions for the authors of tourism RAs, tourism as an academic discipline, and the readers of tourism RAs. The statistical calculation showed that the correlation was 0.87 that signified the use of the FPPs was increasing in the following year. Keywords: authorial identity, diachronic corpus linguistics, the first-person pronouns, tourism research articles.

Revealing traces of depression through personal statements analysis in social media

Depression is a common and very important health issue with serious effects in the daily life of people. Recently, several researchers have explored the analysis of user-generated data in social media to detect and diagnose signs of this mental disorder in individuals. In this regard, we tackled the depression detection task in social media considering the idea that terms located in phrases exposing personal statements (i.e., phrases characterized by the use of singular first person pronouns) have a special value for revealing signs of depression. First, we assessed the value of the personal statements for depression detection in social media. Second, we adapted an automatic approach that emphasizes the personal statements by means of a feature selection method and a term weighting scheme. Finally, we addressed the task in hand as an early detection problem, where the aim is to detect traces of depression with as much anticipation as possible. For evaluating these ideas, benchmark Reddit data for depression detection was used. The obtained results indicate that the personal statements have high relevance for revealing traces of depression. Furthermore, the results on early scenarios demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves high competitiveness compared with state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining its simplicity and interpretability.

Jakarta Indonesian first-person singular pronouns

Abstract Jakarta Indonesian is a colloquial variety of Indonesian spoken primarily in Indonesia’s capital, where it was originally a contact variety between Betawi, the local variety of Malay, and Standard Indonesian. Like other varieties of Indonesian, Jakarta Indonesian is a language with a relatively open system of pronominal reference and multiple forms for self-reference. In this paper we focus on variation in the use of first-person pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, using two corpora of spoken data collected three decades apart. We employ both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the form, function and social meaning of 1sg pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, investigating both inter- and intra-speaker variation over time.