چکیده:
Acknowledgments are vital since students/researchers can demonstrate their genuine appreciation through them and more importantly shape their (local/global) academic identity. In line with this significance, the present study examined the move patterns of 503 Persian dissertation acknowledgements from two major universities in Iran, from 1981 to 2014 and from sixteen various disciplines including soft and hard science disciplines. Overall, 65,323 words were analyzed. By and large, a careful examination and analysis of the corpus indicated that Iranian university students follow a three-tier moves pattern in writing a dissertation acknowledgments, namely a “Framing move” (including six micro steps), a main “Thanking move” (consisting of nine micro steps), and a “Closing move” (containing four micro steps). Moreover, the results indicated that the longest and shortest acknowledgments were 986 and words respectively. The results also indicated that there was a significant difference in the complexity of acknowledgments in hard and soft science disciplines. The results of this study can hold valuable implications for both university students and professors who aspire an appropriate, coherent, and to the point display of scholarly competence and academic identity.
خلاصه ماشینی:
In line with this significance, the present study examined the move patterns of 503Persian dissertation acknowledgements from two major universities in Iran, from 1981 to 2014 and from sixteen various disciplines including soft and hard science disciplines.
By and large, a careful examination and analysis of the corpus indicated that Iranian university students follow a three- tier moves pattern in writing a dissertation acknowledgments, namely a "Framing move" (including six micro steps), a main "Thanking move" (consisting of nine micro steps), and a "Closing move" (containing four micro steps).
Since the publication of Swales’ Genre Analysis Received: 01/11/2015 Accepted: 10/02/2016 ∗ Corresponding author (1990), the field has experienced a greater than ever scholastic interest in the generic analysis of the rhetorical structure of various types of scholarly texts such as research articles (Posteguillo, 1999; Swales, 1990), textbooks and educational materials (Hyland, 2002), research theses (Bunton, 2002; Thompson, 2001), conference papers (Rowley-Jolivet, 2002), grant proposals (Halleck & Connor, 2006), as well as book reviews (Nicolaisen, 2002).
Therefore, in response to the mentioned niche in the literature, the following research questions were formulated to guide the study: (1) What generic structure do Iranian Persian dissertation acknowledgments from soft science and hard science disciplines adhere to?
In the same lines, 58% of doctoral dissertation by Chinese students in Yang’s (2012a) study was allotted to this step by presenting participants to be thanked in the acknowledgment.
Similarly, 99% of dissertation acknowledgements by soft and hard science students in Yang’s (2012a) study thanked for the provision of resources.