Conceptualizations of gratitude: A comparative analysis of English and Persian dissertation acknowledgements written by Persian authors

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present study applies a cultural conceptualizations framework within the multidisciplinary field of Cultural Linguistics to the analysis of gratitude in dissertation acknowledgements (DAs), as a culturally-embedded genre written in Persian and English by native speakers of Persian. Benefitting from a corpus analysis approach to Cultural Linguistics, 185 English and 196 Persian DAs from language-related fields were selected randomly from DAs written in national universities in Iran as the corpus for the study. Grounded theory-driven analysis revealed a number of similar and different representations of Persian cultural schema and cultural metaphors between the sampled Persian and English DAs. Additionally, the unclosed cultural conceptualizations revealed a selective transfer of Persian cultural conceptualizations to the DAs written in English. The paper concludes with reference to the emergence of Persian English in the DAs. By complementing genre analysis with a Cultural Linguistics perspective, the study contributes to the literature on comparative genre analysis of DAs, moving it beyond move-step analysis to a more systematic in-depth cultural analysis. In addition, the findings advance the literature on Cultural Linguistics by revealing a relationship between cultural schema and cultural metaphor.