Pronominal Functions in Female Scientific Discourse: CoWITE and the Coruña Corpus

Isabel Moskowich

Isabel Moskowich, Dr Universidade da Coruña

Keywords: Stance, Authorial Voice, First-Person Pronouns, Women’s Writing, Nineteenth- Century English, Instructive Texts, Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

The study of stance gained popularity from the early 2000s with the many works by Hyland and has been applied to different pragmatic phenomena such as authorial voice. Stemming from the idea that specialised registers are not completely objective, this paper aims at analysing
some nineteenth-century texts by women. In particular, it aims at studying first-person pronouns (both singular and plural subject forms) and the functions they perform beyond the merely referential one according to a classification previously proposed in an earlier paper (Moskowich, 2020). To this end, some texts from two corpora (The Corpus of English Chemistry Texts, CECheT (Moskowich et al., 2022) and the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts, COWITE (Alonso-Almeida et al., 2025) will be scrutinised by close reading to provide a qualitative analysis of the voice of the authors in them and the functions they perform.