A Local Grammar Of Gratitude In Acknowledgments In Linguistic Academic Thesis Across Chinese And American Students

Local grammar aims at providing a linear representation of the lexicalgrammatical patterns with semantic categories within semantically-restricted linguistic domains and has become a crucial research topic in corpus linguistics.This dissertation adopts corpus-driven approach and presents an investigation of the local grammar of gratitude in English acknowledgments from linguistic thesis written by Chinese and American scholars.The study first compiles a corpus of 2,000 acknowledgements written by Chinese and American scholars in 40 universities from 2013-2017 with 1,156,523 tokens.On the basis of American sub-database,9 high frequent key words are selected relating to gratitude expression.Next the research identifies 28 lexical-grammatical patterns,two sets of semantic categories of Acknowledgee and Specifier and 7 functional categories.A local grammar of gratitude is then proposed with 13 local grammar patterns through analysis from lexical,semantic and functional levels of gratitude expression.Contrastive results show that both Chinese and American scholars adopt same local grammar patterns in writing acknowledgments.Differences lie in average text length and pattern frequency that Chinese scholars write fewer words and incline to use nominal patterns and more complex patterns than American scholars.Quantitative analysis demonstrates that Chinese scholars are different in the deployment of semantic categories due to cultural reasons.The findings have theoretical and practical implication for local grammar research,writing English acknowledgements and large scale natural language processing.