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First person pronoun use in academic writing has received much attention from researchers over the past decade (Baynham (1999), Tang and John (1999), Kuo (1999), Ivanic and Camps (2001), Hyland (2001; 2002; 2004), Harwood (2005) and Koutsantoni (2003, 2007), to name a few). It is acknowledged as the most visible representation of the writer’s identity in the text. This paper investigates the influence of revision on the use of first person pronouns in dissertation writing. The aim of the paper is to reach a better understanding of how writers’ identities develop in academic texts during the process of writing. Master’s level dissertations written by international students mainly from the Far East and enrolled at a UK university form the data for this study. The results reveal that the revision process can be used as an effective means to raise students’ awareness of how their identities develop during the writing process and how they might transform from being novices of the academic discourse community to becoming initiates (Thompson, 2001).

This chapter reports on a study that aimed at analysing native speakers’ use of abstract nouns in medical English. More precisely, the study intended to explore native speakers’ prototypical combinatorial patterns of abstract nouns as seen in a self-compiled corpus, the Health Science Corpus. The aim of this chapter is to describe one pattern commonly found in medical English; i.e. abstract nouns in combination with adjectives, and exemplify how this pattern functions within this discourse. The findings reveal interesting points with regard to the positions and typology of adjectives in this pattern. It is hoped that the study will contribute to the linguistic characterisation of medical English and bring to the forefront the usefulness of corpus-based analyses.

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