Genre Analysis Of Acknowledgements In Thesis And Dissertation: A Corpus-based Study

Researches on genre studies have included a great variety of genres in both academic and professional settings since the 1980s. However, as a scholarly genre, acknowledgements in thesis or dissertation have received little attention. For many Chinese graduate students who are required to write their thesis or dissertation acknowledgements in English, there is a lack of understanding on this genre and many of them have vague idea as to the structure, content, and expressions when composing acknowledgements. And imitation of others'acknowledgements is common.In order to gain a better understanding on this genre, and to sensitize EFL/ESL writers or language teachers to some of the cross-cultural variations on this genre, this study, by integrating the ESP tradition of genre analysis and corpus linguistics methodology, examined and compared two self-build corpora of English acknowledgements written by native speakers of English and proficient learners of English (mainly linguistic M.A. students) in China. The two corpora, each consisting of 30 English acknowledgements were collected from the disciplines in social science, mainly from linguistics. The move structure of acknowledgements was identified based on the native speaker corpus. The two corpora were then tagged for moves and steps, as well as some linguistic features. The move structure, the linguistic features (such as basic stylistic feature, sentence structures, language patterns, etc) of these acknowledgements were analyzed and compared. Computer softwares like Microsoft Excel and some corpus linguistic techniques such as concordance, word frequency count, keyword etc. are used during the investigation and comparison.The study revealed four-move structure on native writers'acknowledgements, with only"thanking move"being obligatory. The salient linguistic features and language patterns of acknowledgements were summarized. As to the cross cultural variation, it was found that the Chinese learner writers largely follow the conventions established by the native writers. Yet, there are obvious variations between them in terms of the acknowledgements length, move/step frequencies & complexity, linguistic realization of the moves or steps, linguistic flexibility, etc. Generally speaking, the Chinese students created shorter acknowledgements that are less complex in terms of the move/step structure. They are also more restrained and conventionalized on the overall text organization and language use. However, the Chinese students exhibited more varied use on some specific language expressions, such as the thanking expressions. It is argued that these differences are mostly caused by social-cultural factors, language proficiency and audience expectations.The results of this study can serve as a practical guidance to ESL/EFL learners in writing acknowledgements. There are also beneficial to language teachers in teaching this genre. The study also demonstrated the efficacy of computer use in analyzing and comparing corpus.