Are we still Humble Servants of the Discipline?’ Examining Self-Mention Markers in Research Articles Published in Applied Linguistics

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 PhD, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Allameh Tabatabaii, Tehran, Iran

2 PhD Candidate, Imam Khomeini International University (IKIU), Qazvin, Iran

Abstract

Conventionally , academic writing was encouraged to be objective and impersonal, ignoring the possibility that employing personal markers can reinforce promoting the authors’ visibly and stance. This study has attempted to examine self-mention markers in different sections of research articles in nine revered journals in applied linguistics published in 2000 and 2025. Hyland’s (2005) self-mention markers (the interactional subcategories) of ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘our’, ‘us’, ‘the author’, and ‘the writer’ were coded; with 'mine' and 'ours' being excluded. A quantitative comparison was carried out with a total of 360 articles, 20 from each journal per year. Frequencies were normalized to occurrences per 10,000 words to account for corpus size differences. Statistical testing (chi-square) was applied to compare those distributions. It was found that the personal marker ‘we’ was the most commonly used one (followed by ‘Our’ and ‘Us’), also more frequently observed in the method section in 2025 articles while it was mostly seen in the introduction section of the articles of 2000. Chi-square tests confirmed a significant shift in the distribution of self-mention markers across sections (p < .01). The paper sums up by highlighting the new finds for researchers in the discipline of applied linguistics.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Critical Literary Studies

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 05 July 2026

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 02 February 2026
  • Revise Date: 27 June 2026
  • Accept Date: 05 July 2026

Share

How to cite

Statistics