Academic writing exhibits strong preferences both for and against explicit references to the writer and/or reader, such as I, we and you. While second-person reference is marked, first-person usage is subject to variation, conditioned by e.g. cultural and disciplinary conventions for positioning. English-language research articles (RAs) do not necessarily disprefer first-person singular pronouns, unlike most other contexts (e.g. French (Dahl, 2004), German (Sanderson, 2008), Italian (Molino, 2010), Persian (Abdi, 2009)). First-person pronoun distribution varies considerably across specific disciplines and across ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ fields, with the former relying more heavily on self-reference (e.g. Hyland & Jiang, 2017). Previous research has typically studied variables separately, but the present study investigates the intersection of culture and discipline. The material includes 192 single-author RAs from History, Linguistics, and Literary Studies journals published in Britain, the US, and Sweden—including not only two English-language cultures but also Swedish, which is unusually allowing regarding first person in formal texts. Articles were divided into six groups representing different national discipline varieties. All first-person pronouns referring to the writer and/or reader were included. Frequencies were calculated for each text and entered into a 3x3 full factorial ANOVA with main effects of discipline and national variety/culture. Statistically significant effects were found for the main effect of discipline (F2,183 = 43.083, p < .001, = .320), the main effect of culture, (F2,183 = 22.107, p < .001, = .195), and for the interaction effect of discipline and culture (F4,183 = 10.678, p < .001, = .189). Post-hoc Tukey HSD tests revealed significant differences across many of the groups, with British History texts containing significantly fewer first-person pronouns than all other groups while British Linguistics texts contained the most. The findings further our understanding of the complex roles played by culture and discipline in shaping discourse conventions.
2021.