Title: Generic Structure and Linguistic Features in Theses' Acknowledgments of Graduate Students
Authors: Frederick P. Grengia, Ed.D.
Volume: 9
Issue: 2
Pages: 124-129
Publication Date: 2025/02/28
Abstract:
This study examined the generic moves of the English-language acknowledgements in theses written by Filipino graduate students, with the aim of specifying the rhetorical preferences of these Filipino student writers in terms of moves and steps as well as the use of sentence patterns, modifiers and hedges employed in thanking acts and the choice of sentence subjects. The basic theoretical framework is from the pioneering studies of Hyland (2004) and Hyland & Tse (2004). For corpus analysis and move analysis, the researchers employed the simple frequency count, averages, and percentages to determine the total number of words in the corpus, length of words, occurrences of moves and steps in generic structure. The corpora were taken from the thirty (30) acknowledgement articles from theses of graduate students enrolled in different programs of Saint Columban College. The generic structure of the thesis's acknowledgements of the selected graduate students consisted of three moves: the reflective move, thanking move, and signing-off move. The signing off move was evident and considered as an additional move. Only the second move, the thanking move, was obligatory. Thanking God was added as part of the thanking move. Of all the moves, the thanking move got the highest frequency. Graduate students used more performative verbs than nouns. Thirty-nine (39) % of their thanking verbs were prefaced by a modal would like to while 10 or about 30% were mental state verbs like wish to and want to. Modifiers in thanking acts included adjectives (e.g. heartfelt, sincere, special, deep/est, most of all, and above all) and adverbs (e.g. humbly, sincerely, and heartily) which were often attached to thanking acts in the chosen graduate theses.