Author Identity in Scientific Texts on Economics

Self reference has been widely studied either in comparable corpora or in learners corpora, especially in English, some other major languages as well (Spanish, French), however, texts in Romanian have not been subject to such investigations. The present paper aims at identifying and discussing the manner in which Romanian authors of texts on Economics present themselves to their peers. In the paper the concept of author identity is explored in its linguistic expression in Romanian in the form of first person personal pronouns (direct and oblique cases) and possessives (singular and plural) and verbs in the 1st person singular and plural. Quantitative data are provided on the roles of the first person forms in the texts, according to the typology in Flottum et al. (2006) also taking into account the specific ambivalent position of the PhD student as student and researcher. The possible influences of cultural patterns (French) and domain specific practices are also considered in the analysis and interpretation of data. Prevalent use of the author as researcher is found, with reduced presence of the author as writer, suggesting the possibility to integrate Romania as a reader responsible culture. Overall, the authors prefer to express themselves by means of 1st person plural in both pronominal and verbal forms.