A Comparative Analysis of Writer’s Identity in Pakistani Research Theses of English and Psychology

Authorial presence is the prominent feature of personal metadiscourse. The most significant representation of the writer’s visibility can be represented by using personal pronouns. It helps to establish a direct link between the writer and reader through text. Conversely, writer’s persona in research theses has not received much attention, especially in the field of English and Psychology in Pakistani context. Viewing academic discourse as an interaction, this paper investigates the use of writers’ visibility markers in Pakistani research theses of English and Psychology. Drawing on Karahan’s (2012) classification, the frequency and discourse functions of personal pronouns were explored. The results of this investigation exhibit significant variation in the exploitation of self-mentioning pronouns across two disciplines.