A Contrastive Study of Lexical Bundles Expressing Gratitude in Dissertation Acknowledgments Produced by Chinese and American PhD Students of Linguistics

Abstract

This study compared the five-word lexical bundles (LBs) expressing gratitude in acknowledgments of dissertations written by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics. Two corpora were built: (1) The Chinese University Dissertation Acknowledgments Collection (CUC) which contained 700 acknowledgments with a total of 300,686 tokens, and (2) the American University Dissertation Acknowledgments Collection (AUC) which contained 700 acknowledgments with a total of 493,045 tokens. We then retrieved five-word LBs, of which LBs expressing gratitude in CUC and AUC were identified, categorized, and compared with respect to frequency, forms and structures. Major findings were: (1) the Chinese students used a substantially greater number of gratitude LBs than the American students, (2) the two groups used considerably different gratitude LBs, and (3) the two groups mainly relied on verb phrase-based LBs to express gratitude, but the Chinese students used a larger proportion of noun phrase- yet a smaller proportion of verb phrase-based items than the American students, and (4) the two groups used dissimilar structures and words to construct gratitude LBs. These findings enrich our knowledge of linguistic patterns in dissertation acknowledgments as a unique genre of academic prose, and provide corpus-based learning materials for students tasked with properly expressing gratitude in their theses or dissertations.