Giving credit where credit is due: the case of acknowledgments in PhD dissertations

This PhD dissertation presents a textual analysis of 40 US PhD dissertation acknowledgment sections (PhDASs), defined as macro speech acts of thanking consisting of multiple and variously realized component functional units. Chapter 1 outlines the objectives of the research and identifies its relevant theoretical background; it also points out the contribution that the study offers to linguistics, describes the corpus to be analyzed, and presents a synopsis of the following chapters. Chapter 2 defines PhDASs from both a functional and a formal point of view, specifies what recurrent themes make up their subject matter, explains the reasons for their communicative complexity, indicates what properties qualify them as a genre, and characterizes their typical context of situation. Chapter 3 focuses on the speech act nature of PhDASs. It discusses the comparability between speech acts and genre exemplars; it offers a motivated description of PhDASs as elaborate acts of thanking; it reviews relevant literature on the speech act of thanking and acknowledgment sections; it shows what components and features of acts of thanking are also relevant to PhDASs; and it outlines the method of analysis applied to the corpus. Chapter 4 examines the corpus from both a macro and a micro perspective. It explores the global structure and characteristics of the PhDASs and the specific wording of the most salient notions and of the acknowledgment moves occurring in them. It includes a qualitative analysis of selected texts and text excerpts, which reveals the variety of lexico-grammatical patterns available for the encoding of written acknowledgments and also shows the partly ambiguous nature of given textual phenomena. It also comprises a quantitative summary of the encoding patterns identified in the corpus (i.e. the strategies for the expression of acknowledgments and the structural arrangement of the PhDASs), whose occurrence is accounted for with reference to the relevant context of situation. Chapter 5 derives the conclusion from the findings of Chapter 4 and evaluates the study as a whole. It points out the main problems encountered in analyzing the texts, it signals the limitations of the study, and offers suggestions for further research on PhDASs.