Analyzing Nouns and Verbs Marked With Self-Mention Suffixes in Graduate Theses

Self-mention is considered as the most powerful tool to project authorial presence in academic writing. Although some research has been done on self-mention, there is still little investigated in Turkish academic writers’ self-mention use. Descriptive in nature, the study aims to discover the lexical items marked with first person pronoun suffixes, with a focus on nouns and verbs. Data in this study is drawn from a corpus of master and doctorate theses written in the field of teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The results suggest that writers make use of more nouns than verbs to code their authorial identity, even though verbs display a greater variety. While nouns marked with a self-mention suffix dominate verbs in abstract, introduction, methodology and discussion, conclusion and suggestion chapters, verbs suffixed by a self-mention stand out in literature and results chapters. The study ends with a discussion of top frequent noun and verbs.