Contrastive Genre Analysis Of English Dissertation Acknowledgements Written By Chinese And American Students

Acknowledgements serve a variety of functions in thesis/dissertation: to textualize gratitude for contributors,to develop interpersonal relationships between acknowledgers and acknowledgees,and to display one’s active membership in academic discourse community(Chan,2016,p.177).Despite the various functions,researchers about acknowledgements have been neglected.Therefore,it is necessary to explore more and then have a better understanding of this genre.For this purpose,the present study used a corpus-based method to explore the generic structure of English dissertation acknowledgements written by Chinese and American doctoral students.The researcher first built two corpora composed by 160 texts(80 in each corpus)and then annotated and analyzed the texts according to Hyland’s(2004,p.308)three-tier structure model.Results show that the generic structure of acknowledgements collected in this study is roughly consistent with that proposed by Hyland: Thanking Move is obligatory while Reflecting Move and Announcing Move are optional.Apart from the steps in the original model,the current study identifies other steps,including a mixed step(composed by Thanking for Academic Assistance and Moral Support)occurring regularly,2 new steps(S2.5 Thanking for Assistance in Life and S3.3 Making Resolution)and 1 new sub-step(S2.3.5 Thanking for Providing Environment).In addition,differences in the elaboration of each Step between these two groups are also pointed out and that can be accounted for the different doctoral training conventions or cultural orientations between these two countries.As for linguistic features,acknowledgements written by American doctoral students are averagely longer than that written by Chinese doctoral students while there is no significant difference in terms of word diversity.Altogether there are 6 patterns of gratitude expression;Chinese doctoral students use more Noun while American doctoral students use more Verb.It is hoped that the current study can enrich the research pool of both acknowledgements and genre analysis.