Personal reference is mainly realized by personal pronouns, which refer to the discourse participants or other entities. According to Biber (1991, 70), pronouns are used in written texts when the entities referred to are identifiable through the surrounding text, or when their reference is unknown or general. Generally, in written texts, only third person pronouns are regarded as cohesive, as they refer to an entity mentioned in the co-text, while in spoken language, the first and second person forms refer to the roles of the listener or speaker performed in the situational context. In writing, referents of first-person pronouns referring to the author (I, we) may get their reference from the “context of reference” constructed from the text itself (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 50) by identifying the author(s), while the second person may embody the reader, especially in literary texts. Other typical instances include “quoted speech” in written language (ibid., 48) or “indirect anaphora” (ibid., 49) when the identity of the speaker can only be inferred from the textual context. First person forms in written language, while typically exophoric, may play a part in establishing chains of cohesive reference. This study, however, will not deal with these pronouns, as this particular textual aspect has recently been thoroughly analyzed and discussed in a study by Károly (2009). In her study she analyzed the representation of authorship by comparing two corpora which consisted of 50 RAs and 50 MA theses (selected from the same Hungarian Corpus of Learner English (Károly & Tankó, 2009) as in this research) and interviewed 20 students to supplement the data with their perceptions. It was found that students tend to use a higher number of author pronouns (I, me, my, we, our, us); and while expert writers use them for complex argumentative functions, students use them in text-organizing functions or in discussing their research process. Károly’s (2009) contrastive study shows that students’ explicit knowledge of target language conventions in the use of author pronouns is not reflected in their writing due to the influence of cultural factors. The results underscore the importance of raising awareness of both English and Hungarian traditions in writing for students to develop sensitivity towards the differences in their rhetoric conventions.

 

 

As mentioned earlier, items under the author(s) heading will not be dealt with here. Following Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) terminology, this system of personal reference includes pronouns and other nominals that may function as possessive determiners (e.g., his, her) or as Heads of noun phrases (e.g., theirs, hers). Determiners specify the reference of the noun phrase; in other words, they make them definite, by establishing their connection with the participants in the speech situation or some other entity mentioned in the text (Biber et al., 1991, 69, 270, 271). According to Biber et al. (1991, 70) possessive pronouns that are Heads of noun phrases are “equivalent to a possessive determiner + a noun which is recoverable from the context” (e.g., mine, yours, his, hers, etc.), as in Have you seen my book? No, I haven’t found yours.); that is, they involve two ties, one referential and one elliptical; therefore, they can replace a full noun phrase. Their use is extremely rare in academic writing.

Among the pronouns used for personal reference, the non-human singular (it, its) forms occur most frequently in academic writing, with many different textual functions. In the intersection of personal and demonstrative reference there is another type, extended (or text-) reference, which deserves a brief discussion.