1.1 Object of the Study

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

The chapter will introduce the object of the present study: how the speech act of thanking is realized in the acknowledgements section of Ph. D. candidates’ dissertation. Then the researcher explains the need for the study and the significance of the study.

1.1 Object of the Study

In the present thesis, the researcher is interested in the acknowledgements sections of Ph.D. graduates’ dissertations. Acknowledgement sections are now common in academic books and research articles. They appear in almost all dissertations to offer graduate students an opportunity to convey their genuine gratitude to supporters and enable them to establish their credibility and repay their debts. However, the number of studies on acknowledgements is unexpectedly small and the existing research is mainly carried out to analyze its generic structure. For this reason, the present paper will concentrate on the pragmatic features or patterns of gratitude expressions in acknowledgements and tries to figure out how the politeness principle works in gratitude expressions.

In the past decade, more and more attention has been paid to the research on EAP (English for Academic Purpose). EAP is generally defined as teaching English with the aim of facilitating learners’ studies or research in English. Jordan (1997) argues that EAP is concerned with those communication skills in English which are required for study purpose in formal education systems. Earlier research studied such features in academic articles as nominalization (Dubois, 1982), voice (Tarone et al., 1981), tense (Lackstrom et al., 1973; Selinker et al., 1976, 1978; Oster, 1981; Swales, 1981; Malcolm, 1987).

Performing appropriate speech acts, such as requesting, apologizing, complimenting and thanking comprises a part of pragmatic competence, which is essential to successful verbal communication. We know that different cultures have different ways of realizing certain speech acts. The difference can be attributed to social rules of speaking (Wolfson, et al., 1989). Although a large number of speech act studies have been conducted cross-culturally in the past, many languages which have been studied are non-Asian languages (Yamashita, 1996). And among speech acts that have been studied, the study of the thanking receives little attention from linguists (Rintell, 1989).

1.2 Need for the Study

Despite their importance in academic writings, acknowledgements have been largely neglected in linguistic studies. The literature dealing with acknowledgements often focus on their explicitly argumentative and persuasive genres in terms of moves and steps. To those non-native speakers, acknowledgements writing is not a simple job. In order to make readers fully understand how grateful they are, they have to express their gratitude or realize their thanking appropriately and correctly in a pragmatic way. However, instructions on how to write a pragmatically accepted acknowledgement are rare.

Compared with acknowledgements sections written by Native English Ph. D. graduates, English acknowledgements written by non-native English speakers are often not native-like. For example, the following acknowledgement written by an English major with Chinese background is like a name list of acknowlegees.

Many of my colleagues and friends have helped me in a variety of ways. I should like to put on record my appreciation especially to Mr.Su Xiao-Jun, Ms. Bai Hongai, Mr. Wei Han, Mr. Wang Zhijun, Mr. Wang Quanzhi, Mr. Zheng Shoujiang, Mr. Sun ya, Mr. Yao Lan, and Mr. Liang Xiaobo. The seminars on various topics we held together have always been a source from which I drew inspirations and obtained suggestions.

Apart from namelisting, many other pragmatic faults can also be found in English Major Ph.D. graduates’ acknowledgement sections and the researcher will discuss them in the discussion parts.

Furthermore, regarding the studies of thanking speech act, the conceptual frameworks involved are mainly face theory or politeness principles by Brown and Levinson and the data on which researchers build their theory are daily conversations or oral talks. The present paper aims to study thanking speech act in the written discourse. How can the thanking speech act be realized in academic discourse- acknowledgements section? The answer to this question will be given in the part of the discussion and the analysis will be conducted within the latest framework of politeness principle advanced by Leech in 2005.

1.3 Significance of the Study

As an important section of academic writing, the study of acknowledgements will enrich the research of academic writing, so it is especially helpful to teachers of academic writing. In spite of their importance, quite a few journals have mentioned the section of acknowledgements in their “Guidelines for Authors”. Faced with a growing demand for advanced communication skills, language teachers and analysts alike are under pressure to develop effective academic literacy pedagogies (Berkenkotter et al., 1991) targeting the needs of both native and non-native speakers. For teachers, the fact that acknowledgements assist learners in both formally recording gratitude and constructing that a credible and sympathetic identity located in networks of association, suggests it is worth paying attention to them in class. For students, the study will be helpful in the way of how to reconcile their individual achievement with the interpersonal debts incurred in the completing the dissertation or theses.

Being different from existing studies on thanking, the present one is going to analyze the speech act of thanking in written discourse. Considering politeness in written discourse is a rarely studied area, the present study will give a further impetus to speech act research, thanking speech act in particular.

Furthermore, the framework applied in the present study is the latest framework of politeness principle proposed by Leech in 2005. Comparing with the studies which have been done on the basis of Leech’s old version of politeness principle, the present one is more adaptive to the targeted research need and it is also an instructive attempt to practice Leech’s new modification of politeness principle.

1.4 Overview of the Study

This thesis examines how speech act of thanking is realized in Ph.D. graduates’ acknowledgements. It analyzes 120 PhD dissertation acknowledgements sections (PhDASs), defined as macro speech act of thanking.

Chapter 1 outlines the objectives of the research and identifies its relevant theoretical background; it also points out the contribution that the study offers to linguistics, describes the corpus to be analyzed, and presents a synopsis of the following chapters.

Chapter 2 reviews previous studies on speech act, academic writing and acknowledgements. The author defines “thanking” as an academic act, a speech act and a cultural act. Based on those studies, the author points out what is still needed to explore to enrich the studies of speech act of thanking in acknowledgements.

Chapter 3 focuses on the speech act nature of thanking in acknowledgements. It discusses the definition of thanking as a speech act, an academic act and a cultural act. It reviews the development of politeness principle. Additionally, it defines what indebtedness is and gives the reader a general description of studies on indebtedness.

Chapter 4 shows the reader the methodology of present study. What is the source of the data and in what way the data is analyzed are presented in this section.

Chapter 5 examines the corpus from both a pragmatic and linguistic perspective. All corpus is collected from Internet database of thesis and dissertations. Acknowledgements included in the study are respectively from native English speakers, English major graduates and native Chinese graduates. It presents people included in thanking speech act in acknowledgements, reasons why those people are thanked. And the differences between the three groups are discussed. It explores the structure and characteristics of the gratitude expressions in PhDASs and reveals the variety of lexico-grammatical patterns available for the encoding of written acknowledgements. It also comprises a summary of the strategies for the expression of acknowledgements in the PhDASs.

Chapter 6 derives the conclusion from the findings of Chapter 4 and evaluates the study as a whole. It points out the limitations of the study, and offers suggestions for further research on PhDASs.

Chapter Two

LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter consists of three sections. This first section introduces theoretical background of speech act. In this section, the development of speech act theory and its shortcomings will be pointed out. The second and the third section review respectively the related studies on speech act of thanking and acknowledgements at home and abroad.

2.1 Speech Act Theory

Speech acts studies have been based on speech act theory developed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969a). Austin claimed that we are using words to perform actions in life. According to Austin, a speaker produces three acts at the same time he makes an utterance: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. Austin (1962) defines an illocutionary act as “saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of an utterance or of the speaker or of other persons ” (P.101). When a speaker says, “Can I have a glass of water?” there is some locutionary meaning based on the words used and the grammar it involves. In addition, in uttering this, the speaker performs an illocutionary act, i.e., the act of requesting. The perlocutionary act is achieved if a hearer brings a glass of water to the speaker after hearing this request.

Building on Austin’s speech act, Searle (1969b) proposed five different categories of speech acts: representatives, directives, commissives, expressive and declarations. A representative is a speech act which describes a state or event, such as report, and assertion, (e.g. “I am sure that Mr. Smith will come by 3 o’clock.”). A directive is speech act used by a speaker to have a listener do something, such as requesting or ordering (e.g., “Open the window, please!”). In a commissive, speakers commit themselves to doing something in the future such as a promise (e.g., “I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”). A declarative is a speech act which changes the state of affairs, such as a declaration (e.g., “I now name this ship ‘Blue Ocean.”). This classification should not be taken as categorical, but rather better should be understood in terms of a continuum, specifically in cases where a particular speech act may be interpreted as the result of the interface of two types of illocutionary acts (Edmondson, 1981; Levinson, 1983; and Mey, 2001).

Though Austin’s and Searle’s speech act theory has played an important part in functional aspects of pragmatic theory, it has also been the object of criticism. The first criticism of speech act theory concerns the issue of indirectness. Austin’s and Searle’s theoretical accounts of speech act theory are restricted to the level of the utterance. Examples they used come from fabricated data based on their native-speaker intuitions, and thus, generalizations they drew regarding the way speech acts function in real communicative interaction at the level of discourse are not that convincing. It should be observed that the concept of a speech act in Austin’s and Searle’s theoretical models is restricted to a limited conversational exchange of two subsequent utterances or strict adjacency pair (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), in the form of question-answer, greeting-greeting, or request-acceptance.

Following Austin, Searle claimed that there are general norms for realizing speech acts and that across-cultural differences are not so different. This concept of the universality of speech acts was also supported by Brown and Levinson (1987), which held that strategies for realizing speech acts are essentially the same across cultures even though there are cultural specifications and elaborations in any particular society.

Other scholars have contended that there is considerable variation in the realization of speech acts across cultures. Blum-Kulka (1989) noted that certain request strategies are not common across languages, but that insignificant differences exist between languages. Wierzbicka (1991) point out that most of the speech act studies were from the perspective of Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism. She claimed that the actual realization of speech acts is based on cultural norms and should be different in different cultures. Because the number of studies concerned with non-western language is quite limited, researchers are encouraged to explore non-western languages to strike a balance between western and non-western culture studies to present a full picture of the university or culture-specificity of speech acts.

2.2 Studies on the Speech Act of Thanking

Since the proposal of speech act theory, many scholars have focused their studies on specific speech acts. Recently, scholars home and abroad have done mass research on compliments, blessings, complaints, disagreements, invitations, requests, suggestions, apologies and gratitude. Previous research is mainly carried out from the perspective of intercultural communications. From the table Table 1—A review of speech act, we can find that some speech acts are very attractive while some others are have not paid received enough attention to.

Thanking is one of the most frequently occurring communicative acts in human interaction. Thanking inappropriately, however, can damage human relations.Yet thanking has been seldom researched. In speech act theory, the speech act of thanking is defined as an expression of gratitude and appreciation (Searle, 1969). Significant interlanguage pragmatic research on thanking, such as Eisenstein and Bodman (1986, 1988, 1993) follow this definition. The research suggests that thanking is a small supportive ritual associated with politeness and its social effect is an acknowledgement of the benefit one has received.

When investigating the pragmatics of thanking, Aijmer (1996, pp.35-38) distinguishes between simple and intensified “thank you”/ “thanks”. In order to be successful in communicative situations, a speaker must know different variables for the context of an utterance. Although the number of variables in different contexts are not easy to identify, she still suggests some situational parameters for thanking, such as setting (at work, at a person’s house…), participants (social roles as operator-caller

but also personal relations for simple; friends, family members, strangers and so on) and types of thanking (‘minor favor’ for simple thank you/ thanks- ‘major favors’ or

Table1: A review of speech act Literature literature

Speech act / Empirical research
Request / Blum-Kulka, 1983: Hebrew and English;
Fraser et al., House & Kasper, 1981: English and German;
House & Kasper, 1987: Danish and German;
Rintell, 1981; Takahashi, 1996: Japanese learners of English;
Tanner, 1981: English and Greek;
Trosborg, 1995: English and Danish;
Apologies / Cohen & Olshtain, 1981 Hebrew speaking learners of English;
Fraser et al., 1980; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Rintell, 1981; Trosborg, 1987, 1995: Danish Learners of English;
Complaint / Olshtain & Weinbach, 1987: Learners of Hebrew;
Trosborg, 1995: Danish Learners of English;
Refusals / Beebe et al., 1990: Japanese Learners of English;
Chastisements / Beebe & Takahashi, 1989: Japanese Learners of English;
Correction / Takahashi & Beebe, 1983: Japanese Learners of English;
Compliments / Saito & Beecken, 1997: American Learners of Japanese;
Thanks / Blum-Kulma, 1982, 1983: Hebrew and English;
Einstein & Bodman, 1986; Fraser & Norlen, 1981;