Abstract
Employing author-exclusivity has become an academic writing experts’ mantra in settings of English for Research Purposes (ERP) in the specific context of English as an international lingua franca. This employment of author exclusive personal pronouns (e.g. I and we) has been interpreted variously such as self-display, self-projection, observers, recounters, critics, participants, and arguer by many scholars in recent two decades (Ädel, 2006; Hyland, 2012; Hyland & Guinda, 2012; Shehzad, 2007; Swales & Feak, 2004). These studies along with several others have contributed substantially in this regard in the fields of applied linguistics and discourse studies. However, in more contexts of ESL (such as Pakistan), employment of self_x0002_mentioning needs to be explored to offer significant insights with special reference to English as a global phenomenon. Therefore, the frameworks of author-exclusivity such as Ädel’s (2006) need to be tested for revealing more layers of self-mentioning in research discourses. The current study attempts to explore discourse functions of singular author exclusive pronoun i.e. I by applying Ädel’s framework (ibid) in research articles of social sciences published in Pakistan by the local authors. The corpus of 20 research papers each from the disciplines of English, History, and Education was built and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. We found 45 instances of first_x0002_person pronoun i.e. I used metadiscursively in the corpus. The study identified a few more discourse functions also other than those proposed by Ädel (ibid). Instead of shunning the use of I in academic writing generally, we suggest teaching its use metadiscursively.
Keyword(s)
self-display, I, metadiscourse, exclusive pronouns, Stance, Voice