A Study Of Acknowledgements In Chinese And American Doctoral Dissertations From A Cross-cultural Pragmatic Perspective

The phenomenon of politeness in the social interaction of human society has been a hot topic in pragmatics and sociolinguistics since the 20 th century.Linguistic researchers have conducted a great deal of studies on various types of speech act in order to reveal politeness strategies involved in different cultural contexts.Acknowledgements,as an important type of speech act,are an essential part of dissertations.Students use acknowledgements to express their gratitude for the academic help and moral support provided by others during the dissertation writing process,and acknowledgements also reflect the social identity of the author.However,acknowledgements have not received enough attention from linguists,probably because linguists focus more on verbal forms of speech acts and ignore the written ones.This thesis selects 80 doctoral dissertations from several well-known universities in China and the United States,and extracts the acknowledgement sections from the dissertations of doctoral students from several research directions,namely,Chinese Modern and Contemporary Literature,Chinese Ancient Literature,and American Literature.Then,an acknowledgement database is built by the author,and the author uses a corpus-based method to examine the acknowledgement sections of doctoral dissertations in China and the United States,so as to control relevant variables to the greatest extent possible.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis,the thesis compares differences and similarities between Chinese and American doctoral dissertations in terms of the recipients of the acknowledgements,the move structures,the patterns of gratitude expressions of the acknowledgements and the subject types of the acknowledgements,and explores the reasons for these differences and similarities in terms of cultural backgrounds,communication styles and power distance.This thesis attempts to address the following questions through the study:(1)What are the significant differences and similarities of acknowledgements between Chinese and American doctoral dissertations?(2)What are the causes of these differences and similarities?(3)What are the implications of the study of acknowledgements for cross-cultural communication?It is found that there are both similarities and differences between acknowledgements in Chinese and American doctoral dissertations,which are listed as follows.Firstly,recipients of acknowledgements: Chinese Ph.D.students acknowledge their supervisors and other teachers during their study career most frequently,while American Ph.D.students acknowledge their friends and other teachers during their study career most frequently.Moreover,recipients in the acknowledgements can reflect the different power distance in both countries and show the act of maintaining someone’s face.Secondly,move structures: The thanking move is necessary in both Chinese and American acknowledgement texts,while the reflecting move and the announcing move are optional.Compared with American Ph.D.students,Chinese Ph.D.students use the reflecting move more often to look back on the process of writing their thesis.Thirdly,patterns of gratitude expressions: In the acknowledgement of Chinese Ph.D.students,performative verbs occur most frequently to express their gratitude.While in those of American Ph.D.students,nouns and adjectives occur most frequently to express their gratitude.Fourthly,subject types: Chinese Ph.D.students use the type of none subject most frequently in their acknowledgements,while American Ph.D.students use the type of non-author subject.This thesis explains these linguistic and structural similarities and differences in terms of cultural backgrounds,communication styles and power distance between China and the United States,which are considered to have influenced the acknowledgements of Chinese and American doctoral students to different degrees.This study analyses differences and similarities between the acknowledgements of Chinese and American doctoral dissertations in terms of linguistic features,genre structure and pragmatic functions and explains the causes of the differences.It can fill in some gaps in previous research on acknowledgements,help students understand the importance of acknowledgements and gain insight into their respective cultural differences,thus effectively promoting cross-cultural communication.