communication strategy, academic prose, personal pronouns, research article, first-person pronouns

This paper focuses on exploring interaction in written academic texts (research articles) from two disciplines. It is based on the assumption that written text is interaction. Understandably, interaction in text is a multi-faceted phenomenon and it can be approached from various perspectives. In this paper, interaction is investigated through the use of personal pronouns: the main objective is to find out how particular pronouns?first-person singular and plural?may help writers establish their relationship with prospective readers as well as the particular academic discourse community. First-person singular and plural pronouns are investigated both quantitatively in frequency analysis and qualitatively with respect to discourse functions they perform in research articles. A comparative insight of the paper reflects cross-disciplinary variation in the use of first-person pronouns.