An Analysis of First Person Pronouns and Epistemic Modality in Academic Writing

Theses written by Korean master's students (MTs), dissertations written by Korean doctoral students (DDs), research articles written by Korean experts (KRs), and research articles written by native English-speaking experts (ERs) are analyzed to identify the ways in which the use of first person pronouns and epistemic modality reflect the author's stance and level of certainty, respectively. The first person pronoun 'I' is most frequently used in ERs as a means of securing ownership, whereas KRs use this item the least. MTs, used this item the second most frequently. When it comes to the use of epistemic modality for the writer's certainty, MTs and DDs use 'will ' with the highest frequency, but in rather inappropriate ways and contexts. KRs show a preference for the use of certain items in the low probability group such as 'may,' 'might,' and 'could,' while ERs use many epistemic items from the same group as KRs but with more variation in grammatical classes.