English for Specific Purposes
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Personal Pronouns in English and Persian Medical Research Articles

Masoumeh Tayyebi

Islamic Azad University, Savadkooh Branch, Savadkooh,Iran

Abstract

Today, author's self-mention in academic research articles is regarded as a rhetorical strategy that researchers may employ in order to represent themselves as competent members of their academic community and express their unique contribution to their discipline. In this paper, I conducted cross-linguistic study to explore the frequency and functions of exclusive first person pronoun in the whole medical research articles in English and Persian to find the similarities or differences between the two languages in this regard. To achieve this purpose, I randomly selected 45 English article from the prestigious medical journal ''The Lancet'' and 45 Persian medical research articles from the ''Medical journal of Tehran University''. The results indicated that while the plural first person pronouns occurred in both corpora, the English writers were found to make greater use of self-mentions than Persian writers do. Significant differences were also found in the distribution of the rhetorical functions the two  groups of research article writers perform through the use of exclusive we and our. The most frequent first person pronoun in both corpora was ''we'' and the preferred function for which they were used here was ''explaining the steps and procedures''.

Key words: research article, cross linguistic variation, personal pronouns, functions.

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