Establishing authorial presence by the exclusive-we: a functional approach to self-mentions in engineering research articles

Although academic writing has been seen as an objective form of writing, recent studies have shown that it is a social interaction and not totally impersonal. In line with this view, Hyland (2002) stated also strongly linked the manifestation authorial presence across text. Included in interactional metadiscourse framework devised by (2005), self-mentions enable writers to express their beliefs, show attitudes, become part community, interact readers. Consequently, texts more credible, accountable, interactive through self-mentions. This paper analyses use, distribution discourse functions self-mentions, we-oriented particular. The corpus study consisted 200 Results Discussion sections from research articles (RAs) published field engineering technology, totaling approximately 270,000 words. Both manual automatic were employed achieve accurate results verbs most frequently collocated explicit we analysed manually. quantitative qualitative clearly showed frequent function used was explaining procedure 723 instances (54.69%), least which describing themselves making claim/prediction, each two (0.15%). analysis different (such procedure, stating goals, claim or prediction), but preferred avoid using argumentative (describing can be associated purpose evading