Exclusive and Inclusive Uses of Persian First Person Plural: Science vs. Art

Abstract

The present study has been designed to investigate the exclusive and inclusive uses of deixis ‘ma’ in artistic and scientific texts. It intends to indicate the communicative role of this pronoun, i.e., the way in which it is applied by authors to communicate with their readers. The analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative perspectives by using a Persian monolingual corpus. In the present study, 35 random scientific texts and 35 random artistic texts were chosen for the analysis. In this corpus, all first person plural pronouns were analyzed based on the functions they perform in their contexts. The results show that exclusive and inclusive ‘ma’ is used more frequently in scientific texts than in artistic texts inasmuch as there is neither inclusive nor exclusive ‘ma’ in artistic texts. This indicates authors’ power to communicate with their readers strongly in scientific texts.