Approaching Author Identity through First-person Pronouns and Metadiscourse : A study of opinion articles in US news media
type: CreativeWork
description: This study combines metadiscourse research and sociolinguistic methods to establish which social variables influence the choice of metadiscourse resources containing first-person pronouns in US opinion news texts. The study has three main goals. The first goal is to establish which first-person pronouns are used by the authors of opinion articles, and which social variables influence or at least correlate with their choice of first-person pronouns the most, as well as to study the contexts in which these pronouns are used. The second goal is to establish which metadiscourse resources and to what extent are used by the authors of different social groups. The third goal is to establish if there is any correlation between various social factors and the use of particular metadiscourse resources. The corpus for the study was collected from articles posted on the sites of eleven US news publishers and consists of op-ed texts on politics and social issues along with the information about the authors of these texts including gender, age, ethnic background, education, and occupation. To fulfill these goals the study uses corpus linguistics methods for calculating and comparing the occurrence frequencies of first-person pronouns by social variables and Ken Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourse. The results show that social variables do indeed significantly correlate with the choice of first-person pronouns and the metadiscourse resources containing these pronouns. The pronouns that are mostly used are the subject pronouns I and we, the mostly used metadiscourse resources being Self-mentions and Engagement markers. The most prominent social variables that correlate with the use of pronouns are gender and, to a lesser degree, occupation. The female authors of the articles in the corpus use more first-person pronouns than male authors and show a preference for first-person singular pronouns and plural inclusive pronouns while male authors use more first-person plural pro…
abstract: This study combines metadiscourse research and sociolinguistic methods to establish which social variables influence the choice of metadiscourse resources containing first-person pronouns in US opinion news texts. The study has three main goals. The first goal is to establish which first-person pronouns are used by the authors of opinion articles, and which social variables influence or at least correlate with their choice of first-person pronouns the most, as well as to study the contexts in which these pronouns are used. The second goal is to establish which metadiscourse resources and to what extent are used by the authors of different social groups. The third goal is to establish if there is any correlation between various social factors and the use of particular metadiscourse resources. The corpus for the study was collected from articles posted on the sites of eleven US news publishers and consists of op-ed texts on politics and social issues along with the information about the authors of these texts including gender, age, ethnic background, education, and occupation. To fulfill these goals the study uses corpus linguistics methods for calculating and comparing the occurrence frequencies of first-person pronouns by social variables and Ken Hyland's interpersonal model of metadiscourse. The results show that social variables do indeed significantly correlate with the choice of first-person pronouns and the metadiscourse resources containing these pronouns. The pronouns that are mostly used are the subject pronouns I and we, the mostly used metadiscourse resources being Self-mentions and Engagement markers. The most prominent social variables that correlate with the use of pronouns are gender and, to a lesser degree, occupation. The female authors of the articles in the corpus use more first-person pronouns than male authors and show a preference for first-person singular pronouns and plural inclusive pronouns while male authors use more first-person plural pro…
author: Kolla, Elena
language: eng
keywords: metadiscourse, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, first-person pronouns, opinion
date published: 2018
date modified: 2026-07-27T19:56:27Z
provider: University of Helsinki
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Helsingin yliopisto

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10138/298606