A Corpus-based Study on the Writer’s Identity in German Academic Writing

Abstract—There are different approaches that study the representation of identity and interaction in scientific research articles. Compared to English-speaking countries, German scholars hold different opinions on whether first person pronouns should be used in academic writing. In this paper, the author tried to address the construction of writers ’ identity in German academic writing through a corpus-based analysis. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the corpus, the author found out that the occurrences of first person pronouns in the German corpus are much lower than in the English academic articles. The feature of the German academic writing to avoid the use of first person pronouns shows the impersonal style of German academic writing. This feature has its own cultural and historic backgrounds and should be respected. Index Terms—German academic writing, writer’s identity, author’s role, self-mention, first person pronouns I