An investigation into the generic structure of acknowledgments

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, in the first phase, examined the generic structure adopting Swales’ (1990) and in the second phase, relying on the face theory proposed by Arundale (2006), targeted the politeness strategies of 70 doctoral dissertation acknowledgments written by native speakers of Persian (NSP) and native speakers of English (NSE).