Use of First Person Pronouns: A Corpus Based Study between Experts and Non-Experts

Abstract

This contrastive study is based on an investigation of the use of first person pronouns of 242
linguistics Research Articles (RAs) in expert and non-expert corpora in terms of 1) the use of firstperson
pronouns in expert and non-expert linguistics RAs, and 2) the passive form of first person in
both corpora. The analysis reveals that there are quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of
the first pronouns. The aim is to determine whether expert or non-expert writers use more first
person pronouns. This study shows that first person pronoun is an important aspect of expert and
non-expert texts as included 94 % of all texts of both corpora. In addition, the results indicate
differences in the frequency of use of first person pronoun. Furthermore, findings suggested that the
frequencies of first person pronoun in expert corpus used more frequently than non-expert corpus in
both active and passive forms. Among first person pronoun "we" is the most common pronoun in the
expert texts and non-expert texts