‘We deliberately set high demands for the gold standard’... Inclusive and exclusive pronouns in two social science cultures

Abstract

Intercommunication among the members of academic discourse communities is usually achieved through certain defined genres that aim to achieve the community’s goals. As a result, language analysts have focused their attention on how scientists from different fields manipulate their readership by using personal pronouns and persuade the reader of their claims. This study analyses the use of inclusive and exclusive pronominal signals in English and Spanish research articles and investigates whether there are differences between the two languages in terms of pronominal signals frequency and usage. A corpus of 60 research articles in English and Spanish in the fields of linguistics, education and psychology was used to analyse the pronominal items. The close qualitative analysis of items indicates that the use of exclusive pronouns is higher than inclusive ones in both data sets, and that the most common type of pronoun in both inclusive and exclusive uses is we/nosotros. However, the English speaking community shows an overall higher rate of personal pronouns. The results may indicate a tendency from the English speaking writers’ to self-promote their competence as researchers in an international discourse community, whereas the Spanish speaking writers prefer to detach themselves from their propositions in a more national community. DOI: 10.1400/229694

Keywords

• scientific writing
• pronouns
• discourse community
• contrastive linguistics