| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 100 === In response to the call for the incorporation of interpersonal dimension into the writing pedagogy, this study provides a functional analysis of personal pronouns—an explicit interpersonal marker—used in argumentative texts by Taiwanese college students. The purpose is to see how students of different proficiency levels construct the writer-reader relationship through personal pronouns during the composition. The first part of the study centers on the analysis of 76 learner essays. They are first rated and sorted into three groups of different quality—High, Mid, and Low. Later, the linguistic forms associated with personal pronouns are examined, and the discourse functions personal pronouns fulfill in contexts are also identified. The results of the text analysis are further supplemented by the post-writing questionnaires and the oral interviews on students to obtain more in-depth discovery and interpretation. While the questionnaire aims to reveal how the students perceive argumentative writing, the interview intends to find out the reasons for their choices of personal pronouns.
The results have shown that the use of personal pronouns in the three groups differs in quantity, type and distribution. The High group writers use significantly fewer pronouns than the other two. Moreover, the students use personal pronouns with salient accompanying linguistic forms (e.g. verbs, modals, emphatic markers) to perform various discourse functions, and students of different levels also vary in maneuvering the functions. Overall, the Low group writers tend to be more self-involved, and the Mid group writers are more likely to include in-group and out-group members in discourse. The High group writers, however, present their arguments more objectively. In selecting personal pronouns, the students usually take account of the interrelationship among the writer, the reader and the text, on whose basis the alternatives between subjectivity and objectivity, authority and modesty, intimacy and detachment, or directness and indirectness are weighed. In general, the students use more personal appeals to achieve mutual solidarity with the reader and to intensify their convictions as well, which reflects humaneness and collectivism that have been highly valued in Taiwanese culture. The study has found that the students' strategic choices of personal pronouns in argumentative writing are usually functionally and interpersonally-oriented.
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