Authorial Presence in French and English: “Pronoun + Verb” Patterns in Biology and Medicine Research Articles

Abstract

Certain subjective qualities of scientific research articles are exposed when authors refer to themselves through various means including pronoun use. Drawing upon the online bilingual “Scientext” corpus, we compare personal pronoun and syntactically linked verb constructions within 180 published articles in English and French in the fields of medicine and biology. This study found that overall pronoun frequency was significantly higher (χ2 = 69.45, df = 1, p < 0.001) in English (22.6 per 10,000) than in French (14 per 10,000) and that the French on [one] (23.8%) was significantly more frequent (χ2 = 163.35, df = 1, p < 0.001) than the English pronoun “one” (3.8%). Furthermore, while most French verbs were limited to the present and passé composé, English conjugation was distributed mainly between the simple past, the simple present, and the present perfect. Both the lexis and the conjugation vary with the progression of the research article and the author roles of researcher, writer, arguer, and evaluator. This paper contributes to the discussion of the representation of objectivity in scientific discourse.

Keywords

• corpora
• pronoun use
• research article
• scientific discourse