Politeness in Persian and English Dissertation Acknowledgments

Abstract

Though usually seen as just marginally related to the key academic goals of establishing claims and reputations, acknowledgement as a genre is widely employed in academic discourse to express gratitude for the contribution of an individual or an institution so that writers establish a favorable academic and social position. Having considered the significance of acknowledgment texts in academic writing and the fact that little, if any, has been devoted to highlight dissertation acknowledgments in the Iranian academic context, the current study, adopting Arundale’s face theory, examined the politeness strategies of 70 doctoral dissertation acknowledgments written by native speakers of Persian (henceforth NSP) and native speakers of English (hereafter NSE) in 7 disciplines representing soft sciences. The findings revealed that approximately majority of communicative moves and linguistic steps exploited by the two groups function as connection face except for cases in which writers accept the responsibility of possible errors and weaknesses of the dissertation. Of course, Persian writers, due to their cultural background, used this step more than English ones. To sum up, the study provided valuable information about the socio-cultural practices and personal identity of the writer encoded in the organizational components of this type of genre.