Self-mention in L2 (Czech) learner academic discourse: Realisations, functions and distribution across master's theses

This article explores self-mention in L2 (Czech) English-medium master's theses written in the humanities along three dimensions of analysis: realisation, authorial roles and distribution across rhetorical sections. While extending the scope of self-mention to cover nominal forms, the aim of the study is to find out how Czech graduates combine pronominal and nominal self-mention to modulate the degree of visibility and authority they convey in their texts. The contrastive corpusbased investigation compares a corpus of Czech English-medium master's theses with two reference L1 corpora representing learner and published academic discourse to examine differences pertaining to variation along culture, expertise and discipline dimensions. The findings indicate that realisation patterns of self-mention and preferences for specific authorial roles vary significantly across the corpora. Czech graduates tend to be reluctant to display a high degree of visibility and authority, prefer to adopt a stance of humility, and fail to approximate disciplinary patterns of self-mention. The paper argues that this is motivated by the efforts of students to blend L1 and L2 academic conventions, their lower level of rhetorical maturity, and the audience addressed by the students in the examination context of the master's thesis.