Political scientists on the functions of personal pronouns in their writing: An interview-based study of ‘I’ and ‘we’

Abstract

In contrast to the numerous corpus-based studies of pronouns in academic writing, this paper uses qualitative interviews in an attempt to account for academic writers' motivations for using the pronouns 'I' and 'we' and to describe the textual e¤ects that each case of 'I' and 'we' helps to create. Five political scientists took part in the research, commenting upon their pronoun use in one of their own journal articles and also in the other informants' texts. Seven textual e¤ects that 'I' and 'we' help to construct are identified and described. 'I' and 'we' are said to help (i) make the readership feel included and involved in the writers' argument; (ii) make the text more accessible; (iii) convey a tentative tone and hedge writers' claims; (iv) explicate the writers' logic or method regarding their arguments or procedures; (v) signal writers' intentions and arguments; (vi) indicate the contribution and newsworthiness of the research; and (vii) allow the writer to inject a personal tenor into the text. The insights and implications of the study are discussed and the paper closes by proposing that similar interview-based studies could be used for pedagogical purposes in English for academic purposes (EAP) contexts.

Disciplinary and paradigmatic influences on interactional metadiscourse in research articles

“…3 As reported in the previous section, no statistically significant difference in the incidence of self-mentions (comprising primarily personal pronouns) was found between the qualitative and quantitative RAs from the three disciplines. These results differed from Harwood's (2006Harwood's ( , 2007 findings about the use of personal pronouns in political science. One plausible explanation for the discrepancy concerned the research designs adopted in the studies.…”

“…Such differences in discursive practices, as Hansen (1988) suggested, can be ascribed to paradigmatic assumptions about "what can be known, how it can be known, and how certainly it can be known" (p.207). Two interview-based studies by Harwood (2006Harwood ( , 2007 examined the use of one type of metadiscourse -personal pronouns -by political scientists from various research traditions. While they all used personal pronouns in their RAs to achieve a number of textual effects (Harwood, 2007), they also reported distinct, research paradigm-based tastes for pronoun use, for example, positivist-minded political scientists' preference for pronoun-free RAs vs. political philosophers' use of personal pronouns to add a personal tenor to their academic writing (Harwood, 2006).…”

“…Two interview-based studies by Harwood (2006Harwood ( , 2007 examined the use of one type of metadiscourse -personal pronouns -by political scientists from various research traditions. While they all used personal pronouns in their RAs to achieve a number of textual effects (Harwood, 2007), they also reported distinct, research paradigm-based tastes for pronoun use, for example, positivist-minded political scientists' preference for pronoun-free RAs vs. political philosophers' use of personal pronouns to add a personal tenor to their academic writing (Harwood, 2006). Despite the close link between the paradigm and language of research suggested by the aforementioned studies, how different types of interactional metadiscourse may vary across the qualitative and quantitative research paradigms remains an unanswered question.…”

Publication outlets and their effect on academic writers’ citations

“…This method is known as the discoursebased interview approach [ODELL & AL., 1983] among applied linguist writing researchers. I had used this approach in an earlier study of academic writers' pronoun use [HARWOOD, 2006[HARWOOD, , 2007, and adopted a similar procedure here.…”

Asmeniniai įvardžiai mokslo kalboje

“…Kaip jau minėta, kartais nėra lengva nustatyti, ar autoriaus pavartotas mes yra inkliuzyvinis ar ekskliuzyvinis. Persvazinį tokio dviprasmiškojo mes pobūdį yra pabrėžęs ne vienas mokslininkas, tyrinėjęs asmeninius įvardžius akademiniame diskurse (Harwood 2005a(Harwood , 2005b(Harwood , 2007Vladimirou 2007). Pažvelgus į (46)- (47) (Vladimirou 2007, 150).…”