A Diachronic Development and Discourse Function of First-Person Pronouns in Postgraduate Theses

Self-mention through first-person pronouns allows writers to adopt a stance, claim a stake in knowledge claims and project a disciplinary identity, and it is often discussed in relation to informality in academic writing. This study examines the diachronic development and discourse functions of first-person pronouns in Ghanaian postgraduate writing. It uses a corpus of 40 master’s theses (787,074 words) written at one Ghanaian university between 1980 and 2022 in English, Economics, Biology and Civil Engineering. Normalised frequencies (per 10,000 words) were compared between the 1980s and 2020s using log-likelihood, and each pronoun was coded using Tang and John’s (1999) taxonomy of authorial identities. Trajectories differed by discipline. English showed the highest and most functionally varied self-mention: I and my increased significantly and us declined, although overall frequency was stable between the first and last periods. Self-mention in Economics fell sharply (21.96 to 0.45), and we did not occur in 2020–2022. Biology had no first-person pronouns in the 1980s but 8.18 per 10,000 words in 2020–2022, whereas Civil Engineering remained consistently low. Opinion Holder and Representative were the most frequent identities, and Originator and Recounter the least frequent. The findings suggest that first-person pronouns function as discipline-sensitive rhetorical resources, not merely as markers of informality.