Using two corpora of English abstracts of research articles (abstract for short) on linguistics produced by native English speakers' and Chinese English learners, this article compares native speakers' and Chinese learners' use of first person pronouns in abstracts, especially discourse functions first person pronouns perform. The results show significant differences between native speakers and Chinese learners' use of first person pronouns. The direct reason for the differences is that the directions for writing abstracts in China disagr...