Acknowledgments In English-language Monographs By Chinese Writers:A Contrastive Generic Perspective

Although acknowledgments have been largely disregarded in academic English literature,they are almost general in thesis and books in which they provide writers with an opportunity to express their sincere gratitude for help and promote a good social and academic image.However,in recent years,book acknowledgments have received far less attention than dissertation acknowledgments.This study examines the generic structure and lexical-grammatical features of gratitude accompanying 60English-language monographs by Chinese and international writers.This paper uses Swales’(1990)genre analysis as a theoretical framework,combined with Hyland’s(2002)framework for the acknowledgments of dissertations as a basis for comparative analysis.Results show that all of the texts contain an acknowledgments section,with a total of 580 separate acts of acknowledgments.The genre patterns reveal a three-move structure,which is subdivided into several steps,realized by a relatively limited vocabulary and grammar pattern,which is slightly different from the thesis acknowledgments where move 3-step 3 is absent.It is suggested that the differences between the two corpora are not only due to the language they use,but also relate to the distinctive characteristics of the two different cultures.The study also addresses the limitations and comes up with some suggestions for future study.