Establishing a presence: Self-mention in L2 (Czech) doctoral writing and expert writing in linguistics
Vol.19,No.1(2026)
Discourse and Interaction
Self-mention clearly establishes the writer’s presence in the text and may enhance the persuasiveness of their arguments. Although widely researched in L2 student and expert academic writing, relatively little attention has been given to self-mention in doctoral writing in European contexts. This corpus-based study compares the use of self-mention in 30 English-medium PhD theses by Czech doctoral students and 30 published research articles by Anglophone scholars in linguistics. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the frequency, forms and functions was conducted in Sketch Engine. Overall, self-mention occurred approximately twice as frequently in the student corpus and was more frequent in every rhetorical section. While students primarily employed self-mention to organise the discourse and project a confident stance, experts tended to use self-mention to put forward claims and justify their methodological decisions. The findings may inform future academic writing instruction for L2 doctoral students in similar contexts aiming to publish their research internationally.
self-mention; authorial presence; stance; academic writing; doctoral students; corpus analysis
Daniel Gerrard
Daniel Gerrard teaches English for Academic and Specific Purposes at Masaryk University Language Centre, Brno, Czech Republic. His research interests include academic writing, metadiscourse, and corpus linguistics. His current research focuses on stance expression in academic writing by Czech doctoral students.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9379-7795
Address: Daniel Gerrard, Masaryk University Language Centre, Faculty of Education Division, Poříčí 623/7, 603 00, Brno, Czech Republic.
[e-mail: daniel.gerrard@cjv.muni.cz]
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