1. Research background

Academic papers are social speech acts, and the author's identity plays an important role in academic writing. Through self reference and interaction with readers, academic achievements are presented. The traditional view holds that academic writing should be objective and avoid subjective language, but modern research shows that the construction of author identity contributes to the communicative function of academic discourse. Self reference is a common way of constructing an author's identity, including first person pronouns, third person nouns, and abstract subjects, which reflect the author's level of presence in different forms. The research on self reference in English academic discourse is relatively rich, involving interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, learner level, and discourse differences. There is relatively little research on self reference in Chinese academic discourse, and existing studies are mostly based on frequency comparisons, lacking exploration of linguistic differences and collocation verbs. The aim of this study is to explore the usage characteristics of self reference in empirical Chinese academic journal articles and its relationship with author identity construction, discourse type, and collocation verbs.

2 Research Design

Elaborated in detail the research design of self reference and author identity construction in empirical Chinese academic journal articles. The study selected 5 core Chinese language journals specializing in linguistics and applied linguistics, and 51 empirical independent papers published between 2016 and 2020 as the corpus, totaling 363830 words. The corpus annotation focuses on three high-frequency self referential forms: "we", "this article", and "this study", and systematically annotates the author's identity type, paper language category, and collocation verbs. The author's identity types refer to Tang u0026 John's (1999) research and are divided into six categories, with four being low-risk identities and two being high-risk identities. Based on Swales' CARS model and IMRD model, this paper examines the differences in the use of self reference in six language categories: abstract, introduction, research methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. The types of collocation verbs are based on the classifications of Thomas U0026 Hawes (1994) and Wang Yueli and Xu Hongliang (2019). The analysis methods adopted correspondence analysis and multiple correspondence analysis, using the {ca} and {FactoMineR} toolkits on the R language platform.

3 Results and Analysis

In empirical Chinese academic journal articles, there is a corresponding relationship between self referential forms and author identity types. The first person plural "we" is most frequently used to construct low-risk identities, such as "research process narrator". The abstract subjects "this study" and "this article" are used to construct high-risk and low-risk identities, respectively. The former tends to create new knowledge, while the latter is used to narrate the research process and guide reading. Multiple correspondence analysis shows that there is a specific correspondence between different identity types and the language category and collocation verbs of the paper. We construct diverse identities in different language categories, such as "group representative" in the introduction, "research process narrator" and "guide" in the methods, "discourse builder" in the results, "viewpoint holder" and "new knowledge creator" in the discussions and conclusions.

4 Conclusion

This study explores the relationship between self referential forms and author identity construction in empirical Chinese academic journal articles through correspondence analysis and multiple correspondence analysis methods. Research has revealed that Chinese academic discourse tends to use the first person plural "we" rather than the first person singular or third person. In the construction of author identity, low-risk identities such as "research process narrator" and "new knowledge creator" are more common. There are differences in identity construction among different forms of self reference, which have multiple corresponding relationships with discourse categories and collocation verbs. Specifically, "this article" and "this study" assume different identities in different language categories such as abstracts, methods, discussions, and conclusions, while "we" construct multiple identities in different language categories. The research results are helpful in improving academic paper writing ability and providing reference for academic Chinese writing teaching.