| Acknowledgments are very important polite speech acts in human daily communication.Acknowledgments for doctoral dissertation also belong to the polite speech acts.However,due to its marginality compared with academic text and particularity compared with daily gratitude behavior,it has not received enough attention in both academic and daily speech communication.In fact,dissertation acknowledgments provide a unique perspective to care for the speech act and speech psychology of the doctor.Therefore,this paper draws on Hyland’s pattern of acknowledgments and establishes a acknowledgments corpus of 190 doctoral dissertations of Jilin University in 2020 from 10 disciplines.By combining quantitative and qualitative methods,this paper analyzes the characteristics of acknowledgments under the influence of disciplines from the perspective of discourse structure,explores the value of acknowledgments different from generalized acknowledgments,and further enriches the linguistic research of acknowledgments.Firstly,the textual structure of acknowledgments is analyzed quantitatively.Starting from title,function,capacity,and other discourse structure except title,this paper compares the subject differences,and sorts out the macro discourse of dissertation acknowledgments.Doctoral students have differences in the selection of acknowledgments,a few of the postscript and acknowledgments of the writing requirements of vague cross phenomenon,but generally more inclined to thank the function of expression.The overall word capacity and its dispersion degree of liberal arts students are larger than those of science students,and the sentence length and dispersion degree of liberal arts and science students are not much different.The distribution of sentence length is skewed to the left,and more sentences of 21-40 words are used.Liberal arts students show a tendency to use extremely long sentences.Most texts contain retrospectives,and the rate of retrospectives in arts is higher than that in science.On the contrary,the volume of gratitude moves of science students was higher than that of liberal arts students.Very few texts contain declarative moves and half contain sign-off moves.Jurisprudence has a higher declarative and sign-off rate than other disciplines.Liberal arts acknowledgments more often include other phrases;A total of 11 kinds of expressions were found,and more doctoral students used RTO-type discourse structure.Secondly,the content,emotional words and detail of the retrospectives are analyzed.The content involves the review of the study process and the writing process of the thesis.Most texts choose to review the study process,and the liberal arts show a higher review of the writing process than the science.The amount of positive and negative emotional words reviewed by all disciplines is the same,and there is no obvious discipline difference.The amount of emotional words used in reviewing papers is significantly different,and the amount of negative emotional words is higher than that of positive emotional words.The positive emotion words of study process and thesis writing are gratitude and joy respectively,while the negative emotion words are hardships.One-third of the retrospective steps were detailed,and arts were higher than science.The object,order,name and modifier of the object of appreciation were analyzed again.According to the identity of the author in different help fields,the objects of gratitude were classified into novice researchers,peer researchers,relatives and other categories,and the mentioned frequency of each discipline was counted respectively.It was concluded that the top three objects of gratitude mentioned most were doctoral supervisors,other teachers and classmates.The sequence of acknowledgments shows the sequence of teachers,peers,relatives,and finally other types of objects.A total of ten name reference forms,there are subject differences in referring to other teachers;Science doctoral students tend to list more names to give full thanks;In the academic research circle,there is a tendency of "nominalization" in the presentation of names,and a tendency of "de-nominalization" in the kinship.Science students used more thank you modifiers.There was little difference in the absolute number of all kinds of thank you modifiers between science and arts,and "heartfelt" was the most popular.Finally,in addition to the Hyland move model,there are also introducing and feeling moves in some doctoral dissertation acknowledgments,among which expectation,wish and commitment moves appear frequently,and their structure,position,wording,content and target are elaborated respectively. |
