International Journal of AppliedAcknowledgements

Linguistics w Vol. 14inwgraduate

No. 2 w dissertations
2004 w 259

“I would like to thank my supervisor”.

Acknowledgements in graduate
dissertations
Ken Hyland University of London
Polly Tse Chinese University of Hong Kong

While acknowledgements have been largely neglected in the EAP literature,

they are almost universal in dissertation writing, where they offer students a
unique rhetorical space to convey their genuine gratitude for assistance and
to promote a favourable social and scholarly character. This article explores
the importance of this genre and examines the generic structure and lin-
guistic patterns used to express thanks. The study is based on analyses of the
acknowledgements accompanying 240 Masters and PhD dissertations in six
academic disciplines written by students at five Hong Kong universities, and
on interviews with postgraduate writers. The results confirm the importance
of this genre, with around 90% of the texts containing this section and some
1400 separate acts of acknowledgement. Genre patterns reveal a three-move
structure sub-divided into a number of steps realised by a relatively restricted
range of lexico-grammatical patterns. The analysis also shows that PhD stu-
dents, particularly those in the “soft” sciences, tended to construct generically
more complex acknowledgements with a greater variety of patterns. It is
argued that the unexamined nature of acknowledgements may disadvantage
non-native writers, and the authors suggest that EAP teachers assist their
students by raising their awareness of the ways they can structure their
acknowledgements to promote a competent academic identity.

Introduction

Acknowledging the assistance and contributions of others is now a

well-established feature of the scholarly communication process. Although
apparently unrelated to the important academic goals of establishing claims
and reputations, the significance of this optional genre is confirmed by its
positional prominence, by survey data, and by its widespread use in a range
of forums. Acknowledgement sections are now commonplace in academic
books and research articles and appear to be almost universal in dissertations,
where they offer students a unique rhetorical space to both convey their
genuine gratitude for assistance and to promote a capable academic and social
identity. Yet despite their importance in the academic practice of reciprocal

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2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
260 w Ken Hyland and Polly Tse

gift-giving, acknowledgements have been largely neglected in applied

linguistic studies, which have tended to focus on explicitly argumentative
and persuasive genres. As a result, little is known of their structure and ex-
pression, and students are often left to their own devices when writing them.
This article offers a description of this genre based on an analysis of a
corpus of acknowledgments accompanying 240 PhD and Masters dissertations
written in English by Hong Kong graduates, together with semi-structured
student interviews. We begin with a brief discussion of acknowledgements
as a scholarly genre and then look more closely at the student texts.

Academic acknowledgements

We would like to start by claiming that acknowledgements are a distinct

genre with a clear purpose and physical location. It is, of course, possible to
see acknowledgements as a discourse-type occurring in a number of genres,
such as a step in the Chairman’s statement in company annual reports
(Skulstad 1996) or as a ‘part-genre’ of the texts they accompany (Gionnoni
2002). But to do this may obscure important resemblances and connections
between similar texts and perhaps prevent us from seeing how writers
structure their worlds. We prefer to see acknowledgements as a typified form
of rhetorical action (Miller 1984: 151) which draw on distinct combinations
of formal resources, occur in identifiable social contexts, and use distinct
organising devices. The genre has the identifiable purpose of giving credit
to institutions and individuals for some service to the writer, involves parti-
cipants who have similar relationships to each other, and occupies its own
labelled space adjacent to a text which the service relates to.
In this sense, acknowledgements have been common in published
academic texts since the 1960s (Bazerman 1988), gradually becoming both
longer (Caesar 1992; Cronin 1995) and more common, so that they are now
included in perhaps half of all published research articles (Cronin, McKenzie
and Stiffler 1992) and virtually all those in the sciences (McCain 1991).
Questionnaire research suggests that most academics generally read acknow-
ledgements when scanning a new paper, often to make a preliminary assess-
ment of the relevance of the article, and that some academics even keep a
formal record of acknowledgements to themselves for institutional evalu-
ation (Cronin and Overfelt 1994).
As objects of study, acknowledgements have attracted the attention of
bibliometricians seeking to trace genealogies of interaction, where they have
been compared with citations as measures of “trusted assessorship” (Chubin
1975), as ritual appendages (Cronin 1991), as instruments of credit and reward
(McCain 1991), and as revealing hidden influences behind papers (Cronin
1995). Studies have also found that acknowledgements reflect disciplinary
practices, with the higher rates of acknowledgement in the hard disciplines
reflecting scientists’ greater dependence on institutional and financial support

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and immersion in the mutual exchange of materials and pre-prints (Cronin,

McKenzie, and Rubio 1993).
Acknowledgements have also attracted criticism and controversy. The
fact that they not only point outwards to the factors which help construct
the text but also inwards to its author means that acknowledgements play
an important role in a writer’s efforts to create both a professional and
personal identity. They can therefore represent strategic choices in ‘careering’
by showing the writer in a positive light and managing his or her relations
to the disciplinary community (Ben-Ari 1987). Book acknowledgments, in
particular, have been condemned for the “twin vices of fawning and vanity”
(The Economist 1996) as writers seek to flatter the powerful and praise them-
selves, while the inclusion of tributes to those only marginal to the research
has drawn fire from journal editors (Kassirer and Angell 1991). More seriously,
acknowledgements have also been at the heart of bitter disputes where
co-authorship is recognised merely as collaboration (Heffner 1979; Rennie,
Yank and Emanuel 1997).
For these reasons, acknowledgements cannot be seen as merely a naïve
listing of gratitude. In fact, this rhetorical and contextual sophistication makes
them of considerable interest to discourse analysts and teachers of English
for Academic Purposes. For research students, the genre has a potentially
important role in reconciling their individual achievement with the inter-
personal debts incurred in completing the study. For analysts, the writer’s
metatextual reflections can offer insights into the contingencies of research,
the sources of contributing influences and students’ views of author agency
and responsibility. For teachers, the fact that acknowledgements allow learners
to both formally record gratitude and construct a credible and sympathetic
identity located in networks of association suggests that this is a genre
deserving of pedagogic attention. But while Giannoni’s (2002) recent analysis
has offered a systematic description of the features of acknowledgements
in research articles, we know little of how these texts are structured by
students. In the remainder of this article we address this gap.

Corpus and procedures

The study is based on a corpus of acknowledgements in 240 dissertations

written by students at five Hong Kong universities and on interviews with
student writers. The text corpus consists of the acknowledgement sections in
20 MA and 20 PhD dissertations from each of six academic fields, totalling
35,000 words. The disciplines were chosen to represent a broad cross-section
of academic practice, namely: applied linguistics (AL), biology (Bio), business
studies (BS), computer science (CS), electrical engineering (EE), and public
administration (PA).
The acknowledgements were analysed for their move structure and pat-
terns of expression to determine how these student writers expressed thanks.

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Coding categories were developed inductively through recursive passes

through the texts using MonoConc Pro, a text analysis and concordance
programme, and then entered into the relational database Microsoft Access
to determine frequencies and relationships between categories. In addition,
two Masters students and two PhD students from each discipline were
interviewed by the second author, sometimes in their Cantonese L1, in order
to gain insights into the text data and to discover something of their thoughts
on acknowledgement practices.

Overall results

Both the qualitative and quantitative data confirm the importance of

acknowledgements to these students despite its optional status. Table 1
shows that 96 of the Masters theses (80%) and 117 of the PhD dissertations
(98%) contained an acknowledgement, for an overall rate of 90%.
It can be seen that the doctoral students were more scrupulous in
recognising assistance. This is at least partly because PhD dissertations tend
to be written by full-time students anticipating a scholarly career, with most
already involved in an academic community and familiar with its norms
and practices. Masters students, on the other hand, typically study part-time,
for a shorter period, and complete a dissertation in addition to substantial
coursework. They are looking forward to returning to their professional
workplaces and often have less interest in academic customs. The MBA
students, for instance, who perhaps comprise the most highly self-reliant
and career-focused of the students, reported that they believed acknow-
ledgements to be simply a formal convention of little significance, and only
30% included this section. Most students, however, regarded acknowledge-
ments as an important courtesy, and as a means of publicly recognising the
role of mentors and the sacrifices of loved ones in what is often an exacting
and lengthy task. These interview comments illustrate this importance:

Table 1. Acknowledgement corpus (20 dissertations in each discipline)

Discipline Masters dissertations Doctoral dissertations

texts words average texts words average

Applied Linguistics 18 2,402 133.4 20 7,718 385.9

Biology 15 1,825 121.7 19 3,864 203.4
Business Studies 6 810 135.0 19 2,512 132.2
Computer Science 18 1,483 82.4 20 3,470 173.5
Electronic Engineering 20 1,427 71.4 19 2,771 145.8
Public Administration 19 3,289 173.1 20 3,594 179.7
Totals 96 11,236 117.0 117 23,929 204.5

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It is an important section for the completeness of the thesis. (CS PhD

interview)

It is a very important section as it gives me an opportunity to express my

gratitude. It is a very personal thing. (PA PhD interview)

It’s an important section to include, but I’ve seen some people who didn’t
write one. This may be because they think they did the dissertations
all by themselves, but I think we owe many debts to people. (AL PhD
interview)

It is a must to write an acknowledgement as it is an important channel to

express our gratitude to those who helped in our project. (CS MSc interview)

Altogether, there were 1400 separate acts of acknowledgement in the

corpus, with 1276 different individuals and 138 institutions acknowledged.
Supervisors appeared in all acknowledgements, and friends and teachers
were mentioned most often. In the following sections we describe how these
acknowledgements were rhetorically realised.

Generic structure of student acknowledgments

The purpose of acknowledgements is to give credit to institutions and

individuals who have contributed to the dissertation in some way, while
seeking to make a favourable impression on readers. To achieve these pur-
poses, student acknowledgements have a structure consisting of a main
thanking move framed by optional reflecting and announcing moves (Hyland
forthcoming). Each of these moves can be divided into recurring sub-units
or steps, as shown in Table 2.
Only the central thanking move is obligatory, and steps within this move
comprised 90% of all the acts in the corpus. Most texts omitted an announc-
ing move, and only thanking for academic assistance occurred in every text,
underlining the importance of displaying gratitude to supervisors and other
advisors. A simple, non-recursive structure can be seen in (1):

1) Move 1: The writing of an MA thesis is not an easy task.

Move 2a: During the time of writing I received support and help from
many people.
Move 2b: In particular, I am profoundly indebted to my supervisor,
Dr. James Lo, who was very generous with his time and know-
ledge and assisted me in each step to complete the thesis.
Move 2c: I am grateful to The School of Humanities and Social Science
of HKUST whose re-search travel grant made the field work

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possible. Many thanks also go to those who helped arrange the

field work for me.
Move 2d: And finally, but not least, thanks goes to my whole family, who
have been an important and indispensable source of spiritual
support.
Move 3a: However, I am the only person responsible for errors in the
thesis.

The structure of these acknowledgements differs considerably from

Giannoni’s (2002) description of research article acknowledgements. Giannoni
portrays these professional texts as having two moves, with the main ‘credit
mapping’ move comprising three possible steps: allocating credit to insti-
tutions, to individuals, and claiming responsibility. The clear separation of
contributing individuals and institutions in his acknowledgement corpus,
with the latter being far more frequent, is not observed in these dissertation
acknowledgements, where institutional thanks are relatively rare. Nor is his
preceding optional ‘introductory move’, which provides information about
the article’s origins in earlier texts or events such as seminars, conferences
and working papers, found in the student texts.
The results also showed broad discipline and degree variations in the
frequency of acknowledgements, in the reasons for expressing thanks, in the
structural complexity of the genre, and in the preferred syntactic patterns
used to express gratitude. Writers in the discursive soft sciences tended to
construct more and generically more complex acknowledgements, and used
a greater variety of patterns, than the science and engineering students.

Table 2. Move structure of dissertation acknowledgements

1. Reflecting Move introspective comment on the writer’s

research experience
2. Thanking Move mapping credit to individuals and institutions
a. presenting participants introducing those to be thanked
b. thanking for academic thanks for intellectual support, ideas, analyses
assistance feedback, etc.
c. thanking for resources thanks for data access and clerical, technical
or financial support
d. thanking for moral thanks for encouragement, friendship,
support sympathy, patience, etc.
3. Announcing Move statements delineating responsibility and
inspiration
a. accepting responsibility an assertion of authorial responsibility for
flaws or errors
b. dedicating the thesis a formal dedication of the thesis to an
individual(s)

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Two-thirds of all reflections and closing moves occurred in the humanities

and social sciences, and these differences were more clearly marked in the
Masters texts: only 4% of the acknowledgements in the hard sciences
contained a reflecting move, and less than half offered any thanks beyond
academic support.
Clearly, the steps offering thanks are the core of the genre, with thanking
for academic assistance accounting for 38% of all steps and thanking for
moral support comprising 25%. Together these expressions of gratitude made
up almost two-thirds of all the steps in the corpus and three-quarters of all
acts of thanks. The following interview quotes confirm the value of this
support to student writers:

I’d include those people who have helped in my project in my acknow-

ledgement, including my supervisor, co-supervisor and English tutor, as
well as some informal sources, such as online discussion groups and
helpful colleagues. (CS PhD interview)

I think we should not only be thankful for intellectual help, but also for
spiritual support. Therefore, I’d include whoever helped in my project,
including those who helped in collecting data, librarians, as well as
family members. (AL PhD interview)

I’d include those who helped, including my supervisor, friends, and

colleagues. It is also appropriate to thank for spiritual support, so I’d also
include my friends in church and family members. (Bio PhD interview)

In the next sections, we focus on the ways these thanks were expressed.

Patterns of gratitude expressions

While there is a popular belief that there is great diversity in the style and
form of acknowledgements (Cronin et al. 1993), the 1414 acts of gratitude used
to realise steps 2b to 2d in this corpus were expressed in a surprisingly limited
number of ways. All thanking steps contained either an overt expression of
gratitude, expressed through a nominalization, a performative, an adjective, or
a passive, or they simply mentioned the name of the recipient without explicit
thanks. While this latter category contains a variety of formal realisations,
they are similar pragmatically in not offering an overt expression of thanks.
The frequencies with which all these forms occurred are shown in Table 3.
As can be seen, verbs and nouns were the main ways of expressing
gratitude, each comprising about one-third of all the pattern types. The distri-
butions were fairly similar across the Masters and PhD corpora, although
the Masters students used a more restricted range of expressions and relied
particularly on nominalised forms, which were about 50% more frequent

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Table 3. Patterns expressing gratitude

Form Example Occurrences

nominalization “My sincere thanks to . . .”, 476

“The author’s gratitude goes to . . .”
performative verb “I thank . . .” 469
“The author appreciates . . .”
adjective “I am grateful to . . .” 218
“The author is thankful for . . .”
passive “Y is thanked for . . .” 155
“Appreciation is given to . . .”
bare mention “I cannot go without mentioning . . .” 96
“X has been helpful in . . .”
Total 1414

than in the PhD acknowledgements. Writers in all the PhD disciplines used
more performatives in expressing gratitude, and this was particularly marked
in the science and engineering texts. Overall, there was a strong preference
for the performatives thank and acknowledge, often with an introductory
preface, which accounted for 28% of all forms (example 2), and for the nouns
thanks and gratitude at 25% (example 3):

2) Above all, I wholeheartedly thank my mighty God for giving me the vision,
power, spirit and endurance to complete this interesting research. (AL PhD)
I also gratefully acknowledge the staff of the Department of Economics
for giving me all necessary assistance during my studies. (BS PhD)
3) Special thanks must be made to the interviewees who rendered their
valuable time and effort to answer my questions. (PA PhD)
I would like to express my gratitude to the industrial adviser in Kowloon-
Canton Railway Corporation, Dr. Wong, for sharing his valuable sugges-
tion and experience with me. (EE MSc)

Returning to the three main thanking steps in the structure of the genre,
Table 4 shows that while writers generally expressed thanks using nouns
and performatives, these forms were more dominant when expressing grati-
tude for academic and moral support.
Adjectivals, passives and simple mentions were particularly frequent
when writers offered their thanks for resources. This step addresses the
dependence of dissertation writers on the cooperation or direct help of those
they study or who provide material support. It acknowledges access to data
and information that might have otherwise been difficult for the writer to
obtain, or for clerical assistance, technical help and financial support. This

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Table 4. Distribution of thanking expressions across genre steps (%)

Step Noun Verb Adjective Passive Mention Total

Academic 33.5 33.3 14.4 11.4 7.4 100

Moral 40.8 35.6 11.6 9.4 2.6 100
Resources 25.3 29.9 21.9 12.1 10.8 100
Total 33.7 33.0 15.5 11.0 6.8 100

step occurred in two-thirds of the acknowledgements and generally followed

step 2b, but there were degree and discipline variations in its frequency.
The step was underrepresented in the business studies and computer science
acknowledgements and was twice as frequent in the PhD texts, where such
assistance is often considerable.
While this kind of support is crucial to the reported research, it is in-
frequently mentioned within the dissertation itself and is often only ritually
recognized in acknowledgements. Thanks expressed through adjectives,
passives and simple mentions seems less fulsome than when a noun or
performative verb is used, partly perhaps because of the formality of such
uses. The adjectives used to express thanks in the corpus were mainly derived
from noun and verb base-forms and typically ended in –ful, a relatively
uncommon form in everyday uses, which may account for the rather formal
connotations of these items:

4) Winnie Chan provided me with technical support, for which I am very

grateful. (CS PhD)
I am thankful to the staff, officers and volunteer workers of the Mission
for Filipino Migrant Workers for giving me unlimited access to their
library resources. (AL PhD)

Similarly, passives, by removing the actor who offers the thanks, and
bare mentions, by removing the thanks itself, provide writers with low-
key ways of expressing gratitude, and as a result, these occurred relatively
rarely in the personal acts of acknowledging friends and family and were
over-represented in offering thanks for resource support. We will return to
these choices below when discussing subject patterns.

Modifying thanking acts

A number of the examples above show that the act of thanking was also often
accompanied by an adjective or adverb to intensify the extent of the writer’s
gratitude, with 35% of the acts amplified by a range of 43 different items. Such
qualifiers testify to the subjective, interpersonal relevance of the assistance

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268 w Ken Hyland and Polly Tse

received, with numerous cases of hearty, warm, and heartfelt, although

these principally occurred in the soft sciences, and once again there was a
marked preference for only a few items, with special, sincere(ly), and deeply
(deepest) comprising two-thirds of all cases. Most instances were confined
to steps 2b and 2c, with special and sincere tending to be appended to thanks
to supervisors and more intense forms reserved for family members and
friends:

5) In particular, special thanks go to my project supervisor, Dr. Anson Liu for

providing many papers to enrich my understanding of this topic. (BS MA)
Dr. K.F. Cheung is sincerely thanked for his helpful suggestions and
discussions during the study. (Bio MSc)
I am deeply indebted to my family, especially my kids and my wife Lily.
Their love and support provided me the energy to attain my study. (CS PhD)
My heartfelt gratitude especially to my two mentors, my mother, Mrs.
Jenny Chan and my father, Late, Dr. Derek Chan who said that I could
do whatever I set my mind to. (AL PhD)

While the thanks were often intensified in this way, in many cases the full
illocutionary force of the statements were also weakened by an introductory
phrase before the main verb. While these sentences are no less ‘performative’
in the sense of effecting the act they describe, the force of the act is neverthe-
less diminished by the occurrence of the introductory phrase. Just over half
(52%) of all acts of thanks in the corpus were preceded by a preface which,
through extensive use of modals and mental state verbs, acted to pre-modify
the thanks by foregrounding either the writer’s inclination (6) or obligation
(7) to perform the act:

6) I would like to express my gratitude to the City University of Hong Kong

for offering financial assistance and first-class facilities during my study.
(BS PhD)
I also wish to express my gratitude to my parents, brother and sister who
always supported me during this period. (AL MA)
Also I want to thank Dr. Peter Tam and Dr. Teresa Leung, members of my
advisory committee, for giving me helpful suggestions on this project.
(Bio PhD)
7) Moreover, I have to thank to my boss, Mr. Wong Ka Sing, the deputy
managing director as well as my colleagues of T&T Engineering Company
and T&T Fuel Station. (BS MA)
Special thanks need to be directed to those who devoted their time for
interviews and also to friends who did the transcriptions for me. (PA MA)

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Here I should express my gratitude to Mr. Jerry Lam. (EE MSc)

The Masters acknowledgements were more likely to contain a preface,

and these were almost twice as likely to signal the writer’s inclination, typ-
ically through the pattern “I would like to thank/acknowledge . . .”. Yet while
these fixed phrases perhaps tended to be used rather formulaically to add an
element of formality to the expression of thanks, they also seem to mitigate
the full force of the gratitude by thematising the writer’s motivation for
offering thanks and thus relegating the importance of the thanks itself. The
desire to hedge gratitude may be related to the relative power imbalance
between acknowledger and acknowledgee in these cases and to the desire of
students to avoid imposing a debt on those they thank. Brown and Levinson
(1987) suggest that the expression of unhedged gratitude can constitute a
threat to the face of the addressee by encroaching on his or her independ-
ence and desire to be unimpeded. Constructing their thanks with a preface
in this way may therefore reflect a recognition of these socially delicate
interactions. They perhaps represent a means by which writers seek to miti-
gate the inherent imposition of gratitude and the debts of reciprocation it
may imply.
When a thanking act was preceded by a preface in this way, it generally
referred to the writer’s inclination or intention to perform the act of thanking,
with only 20% expressed as obligation. Framing gratitude in this way may
seem somewhat grudging, suggesting that the writer is somehow required
to offer thanks. However, in this context almost all the obligation modals
used signalled the writer’s personal stance and what he or she considered
necessary or desirable. In other words, these prefaces typically marked the
accompanying statement as an intrinsic obligation, rather than an externally
imposed necessity, and implied that the writer was unable to resist the
strong need to thank those who have offered support. This is most evident
when thanks are given to friends and family:

8) I must show my gratitude to my colleagues Ms. Joey Wo, Ms. Jessica

Lau, Susie Lui and my English panel Ms. Vivian Tam, who gave me
encouragement and kind assistance in collecting the questionnaire for
me. (AL MA)
I need to also thank my wife, Mai Yin, who spent days and nights alone
with our daughter taking care of all the tasks that should have been
shared by me as a father and a husband. (Bio PhD)
Finally I should thank my two best friends, Penny and Kelly, for their
endless encouragement and support throughout the whole period. (PA
PhD)

While this may be an L2 feature of the corpus, we have no evidence that

native English-speaking students do not use the same forms.

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Choice of authorial subjects

Another interesting feature of the expression of thanks in the data was

the significant use of authorial pronouns in subject position. This represents
an interesting rhetorical contrast to the sporadic use of first person in the
dissertations themselves, where students often tend to underuse authorial
pronouns and determiners, downplay their role in the research, and adopt a
less clearly independent stance compared with expert writers (Hyland 2002).
For these students, impersonality is a defining feature of expository writing,
largely because it is seen to embody the positivist assumption that academic
research is purely empirical and objective:

I don’t think the use of ‘I’ is appropriate as it entails personal opinions.

I’ve seen some people using ‘I’ in the objective and conclusion sections,
so I think it may be acceptable in these sections but never in core content,
except when I’m talking about something that is invented by myself. (CS
interview)

Though I’m not sure if the use of ‘I’ is acceptable, I’d avoid using it
because it denotes some kind of self opinion while most of the content in
a thesis needs to be objective. I think my supervisor would also cross out
instances of ‘I’. (EE interview)

As I observe from reading other scholarly papers, it is not acceptable to

use ‘I’ in academic papers, so I very rarely use ‘I’ in my dissertation, except
maybe in the analysis part but still it is not very often. This is also because
my thesis is on political issues and objectivity is important. (PA interview)

Table 5, however, highlights a preference for author subjects in acknow-

ledgements. I comprised the subject of 66% of all thanking acts and my 6%,
16% contained no subject at all, 8% were non-authorial subjects, and 4%

Table 5. Subject types in postgraduate dissertation acknowledgements (%)

Masters Dissertations Doctoral Dissertations

I/my none non- the I/my none non- the

author author author author

AL 97.5 7.3 2.1 3.1 74.7 11.9 13.3 0.0

Bio 60.0 12.0 12.0 16.0 73.9 13.4 12.8 0.0
BS 93.8 6.3 0.0 0.0 48.5 25.7 9.9 15.8
CS 75.5 17.0 3.8 3.8 74.4 19.7 5.8 0.0
EE 56.3 10.4 2.1 31.3 75.0 14.8 7.4 2.8
PA 81.6 14.9 3.4 0.0 67.8 28.2 1.6 2.4
Total 76.3 11.7 4.0 8.0 70.5 17.8 9.2 2.6

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involved writers referring to themselves as the author. This preference for

personal subjects not only contrasts with uses in the dissertations proper
but also with Giannoni’s (2002) findings of a preference for I-avoidance in
research article acknowledgements, where writers made extensive use of the
author, a more impersonal form which serves to distance writers from their
thanks.
These postgraduate students, however, were not afraid to use the first
person in acknowledgements, as they sought to foreground their commit-
ment to their words, set up a relationship with their readers, and establish
their personal sincerity in thanking various people:

9) I would like to thank my parents and sister for their love and support.
(EE PhD)
My sincere gratitude goes to Dr. Timothy Cho for his kind encouragement
and patient supervision. (AL MA)

Acknowledgements are obviously one of the most explicitly interactional

of academic genres, one whose communicative purpose virtually obliges
writers to represent themselves and their views unreservedly. The authorial
role of the first person still clearly positions the writer in relation to his
or her statements, but this is a less threatening prospect in the acknow-
ledgements where writers feel able to express themselves more freely,
unencumbered by the conventions of powerful academic discourse types.
Here the authorial roles, individual purposes, and writer–reader relationship
are very different from the choices available in research genres, as our
informants recognised:

I’d not use ‘I’ except in writing the acknowledgement because I think it is
not appropriate. (Bio interview)

It is allowed to use ‘I’ in the acknowledgement and conclusion, and it is

a convention to use passive voice in other chapters to be more objective.
(CS interview)

I’d only use ‘I’ in the introduction and acknowledgement because I feel
that I’ve more freedom in those sections and can use a more friendly
tone. The use of ‘I’ is not appropriate in other chapters which need to be
more serious. (PA interview)

But while the demands of the dissertation proper are relaxed here, not all
acts of thanks involved explicit authorial involvement, and Table 5 shows
that almost a third of acts were not author-fronted. In fact, the second most
frequently found pattern in the corpus (16%) contained no subject at all,
with the subject removed by either agentless passive forms or ellipsis:

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272 w Ken Hyland and Polly Tse

10) Thanks also go to my colleagues who have given their valuable time to
provide me with the information requested. (CS MSc)
Special recognition must be given to Dr. Philip Chung for his great help
in my statistics. (BS MA)

The choices adopted here not only create a more formal, almost ritualistic,
impression of recognition, but also remove the writer from the acknowledging
process, disguising his or her responsibility and reducing accountability.
While such examples are rare with thanks for moral support, they tend to be
closely associated with resource assistance, particularly with access to data
or materials.
Perhaps more interesting is the third most frequent category, in which
the subject was someone other than the writer (labelled ‘non-author’ in
Table 5). A number of these instances were passive forms which cast the
acknowledgee as subject:

11) Y.E. Yu provided me with technical support, for which I am very grateful.
(CS PhD)
Mr. M.K. Man is sincerely thanked for his guidance and technical support.
(Bio MSc)

More often, though, these cases were realised by writers simply mention-
ing the assistance of the addressee without expressing thanks. As we noted
earlier, this pattern suggests a possible reluctance by the writer to give overt
credit for the help they have received from a source while nonetheless
following the conventions of including it in their acknowledgements. Resource
assistance, especially from institutions, and particularly for funding, was
often mentioned in this way, cursorily identifying the acknowledgee and
recognising the assistance, but failing to thank these rather abstract, non-
human addressees:

12) The University of Hong Kong Committee on Research gave me financial

support for attending various overseas conferences in which I presented
my papers and received comments from the participants. (EE PhD)
This work has been funded through the Li Ka Shing Postgraduate
Scholarship, the Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited Post-
graduate Scholarship, and a research assistantship from the Department
of Computer Science at HKU. (CS PhD)

Finally, representing just 4% of the subject patterns in the thanking acts,

writers referred to themselves as ‘the author’:

13) The author wishes to acknowledge the co-operation and service provided
by the Labour Department in endorsing this study. (CS MSc)

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 Acknowledgements in graduate dissertations w 273

This author would like to express her heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Kevin
Chan for his insightful advice and towering support throughout the
current study. (AL PhD)

Once again, this option distances the writer from the act of thanking, attri-
buting the thanks to an impersonal agent and thereby weakening the writer’s
responsibility for any imposition on the addressee or potential face violation.
In sum, most writers were comfortable with the use of first person subjects
in acknowledgements and displayed a remarkable sophistication in their
grasp of the shift in context from the dissertation proper that this involved.
But while these writers may have a relatively sophisticated grasp of the
interpersonal nature of the genre, they appear to lack control of the varied
ways that thanks can be expressed in English, such as the forms illustrated
in Swales and Feak (2000: 204–6). For some writers, principally those in the
hard science disciplines, and in some contexts, mainly in offering thanks for
resources, there is some reluctance to firmly commit themselves to their
acknowledgements.

Conclusions

Dissertation acknowledgements are sometimes considered an unconvention-

alised genre which allows writers to express themselves unreservedly
and sincerely. However, like other academic texts, acknowledgements are
staged genres with a coherent structure and routinely employed patterns of
expression. While allowing variation, it is essentially this structure which
enables writers to both convey their gratitude and to display an appropriate
scholarly competence. It is a framework through which writers are able to
balance debts and responsibilities as well as to display their immersion in
scholarly networks, their active disciplinary membership, and their observ-
ance of the valued academic norms of modesty, gratitude and appropriate
self-effacement. In other words, the acknowledgement section is not an
opportunity for students to lay aside their academic persona and freely
express themselves in inconsequential flourishes. Rather, it clearly positions
writers in relation to their statements and can reveal a professional and
personal identity which may influence assessors and readers at the outset.
But while the widespread use of this genre in postgraduate dissertations
reflects their importance to students, the writers in this study reported that
they received little instruction in the genre. Textbooks and style guides often
have little to say about the topic and, like the novice academics in Cronin
and Overfelt’s (1994) survey, they garnered advice on the etiquette and
conventions of acknowledgements informally and examined other disserta-
tions to get ideas for structure, expression and style. We believe that the
unexamined nature of acknowledgements can handicap writers in their
attempts to demonstrate their capabilities and intellectual autonomy while

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

274 w Ken Hyland and Polly Tse

recognising the assistance they have been given. The acknowledgment

section offers graduate students the opportunity to make a positive first
impression on assessors, and EAP teachers can greatly assist them in this by
raising awareness of the ways thanks can be structured to promote a compe-
tent scholarly identity.
Much work remains to be done, and we have only scratched the surface
here in examining the ways gratitude is expressed by Cantonese and Mandarin
speakers writing in English. Little is known of the ways other language
groups or English L1 writers express thanks, the boundaries of personal
choice, or of the influence of situational and personal factors. But while
more research is needed, a necessary first step is to recognise that these
rhetorical choices can be important and to ensure that students understand
both the options available to them and the effects they can have on readers.

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[Received 15/1/03; revised 22/3/03]

Ken Hyland
School of Culture, Language and Communication
Institute of Education
University of London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
e-mail: [email protected]

Polly Tse
Department of English
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Sha Tin
New Territories
Hong Kong
e-mail: [email protected]

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004