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Article published In: Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 15:3 (2024) ► pp.425–447

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Conventions of author self-reference in Chinese academic writing

Modesty as motivation

ORCiD logo with link | Dalian University of Foreign Languages | California State University
 | Xi’an International Studies University
Published online: 10 May 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.19065.che
Abstract
In this paper, we report on how authors of academic writing in Chinese (AWC) refer to themselves as single authors in the area of language studies. We find that AWC writers rely on the 1st-person plural 我们women “we,” 3rd-person NPs such as 作者/笔者 zuozhe/bizhe “this author,” and inanimate NPs such as 本文 benwen “this article/paper” for self-reference. Based on these findings and subsequent surveys of journal style guides and interviews of authors, we propose that (1) these self-referring expressions are a set of conventions; (2) the motivation for these conventions is modesty, a deep-routed value of Chinese society; and (3) these expressions serve as indexicals to the writers’ identity of a modest scholar in the particular discursive context: the genre of academic writing. By so doing, our work links language use to social values, to identity studies, as well as to genre analysis, thus contributing to the literature in all these fields of investigation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on author self-reference
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Survey of journal publications
    • 3.2Survey of journal guidelines and interviews of authors
  • 4.Findings from the journal publication survey
  • 5.Findings from survey of journal guides and interviews of authors
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Author self-reference as discourse convention
    • 6.2Modesty and social values
    • 6.3Modesty and author identity
    • 6.4Identity indexing and discursive context
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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