Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 12:4 (2021) ► pp.515–536

Gratitude communication in academic written acknowledgement

Gender variation

| National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology
In the existing literature, no attempt has been made to inspect how men and women rhetorically manage their gratitude communications in the academic written discourse. To bridge this knowledge gap, the present article examined how students of different gender construct their thanking acts in the acknowledgements of their M.A. theses. Discrepancies between male and female postgraduates’ employment of linguistic patterns and gratitude themes were compared. The results showed that student writers’ gratitude communications to a certain extent are conditioned by the conventional rhetorical patterns of the academic genre. Remarkable gender variations were evidenced in the students’ selections of lexical items for encoding the thanking expressions, thanking modifiers, and gratitude themes of their acknowledgements. These gender discrepancies in gratitude communications are highly pertinent to the social expectations of masculinity and femininity, the students’ psychological orientations toward the emotion of thanking and their own value priorities.
Keywords: gender variation, speech act, gratitude communication, acknowledgement, academic written discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The current study
    • 2.1Data collection
    • 2.2Data elicitation
    • 2.3Data coding
  • 3.Results and discussions
    • 3.1Thanking strategies in the male and female students’ acknowledgements
    • 3.2Gratitude themes in the male and female students’ acknowledgements
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 29 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.16018.tan
References (37)
References
Al-Khawaldeh, Nisreen N., and Vladimir Žegarac. 2013. “Gender and the Communication of Gratitude in Jordan.” Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 3 (3): 268–287. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bazerman, Charles. 1998. Shaping Written Knowledge. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Beutel, Ann M., and Margaret M. Marini. 1995. “Gender and Values.” American Sociological Review 60 (3): 436–448. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brody, Leslie R. 1997. “Gender and Emotion: Beyond Stereotypes.” Journal of Social Issues 53 (2): 369–394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1999. Gender, Emotion, and the Family. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bromnick, Rachel D., and Brian L. Swallow. 2001. “Parties, Lads, Friends, Love and Newcastle United: A Study of Young People’s Values.” Educational Studies 27 (2): 143–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Stephanie W. 2005. “An Exploratory Cross-cultural Study of Interlanguage Pragmatic Development of Expressions of Gratitude by Chinese Learners of English.” Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa.Google Scholar
2012. “A Contrastive Study of Master Thesis Acknowledgements by Taiwanese and North American Students.” Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 2 (1): 8–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Stephanie W., and Chih-Wei Kuo. 2011. “A Pragmatic Analysis of MA Thesis Acknowledgements.” Asian ESP Journal 7 (3): 29–58.Google Scholar
Cui, Xue-Bo. 2012. “A Cross-linguistic Study on Expressions of Gratitude by Native and Non-native English Speakers.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research 3 (4): 753–760. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eisenstein, Miriam, and Jean W. Bodman. 1986. “‘ I Very Appreciate’: Expressions of Gratitude by Native and Nonnative Speakers of American English.” Applied Linguistics 7 (2): 167–185. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1995. “Expressing Gratitude in American English.” In Interlanguage Pragmatics, ed. by Gabriele Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 64–81. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Emmons, Robert A., and Charles M. Shelton. 2002. “Gratitude and the Science of Positive Psychology.” In Handbook of Positive Psychology, ed. by C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez, 459–471. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Farris, Catherine S. 1988. “Gender and Grammar in Chinese: With Implications for Language Universal.” Modern China 14 (3): 277–308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fauziyah, Nur Utami. 2010. “Gratitude Expressions and Gratitude Responses of Male and Female Characters in Rachel Getting Married Movie.” Ph.D. diss., Maulana Malik Ibrahim State Islamic University of Malang.Google Scholar
Froh, Jeffrey J., Charles Yurkewicz, and Todd B. Kashdan. 2009. “Gratitude and Subjective Well-being in Early Adolescence: Examining Gender Differences.” Journal of Adolescence 32 (3): 633–650. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Anne K., Dara R. Musher-Eizenman, Shayla C. Holub, and John Dalrymple. 2004. “What are Children Thankful for? An Archival Analysis of Gratitude Before and After the Attacks of September 11.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 25 (5): 541–553. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyland, Ken. 2003. “Dissertation Acknowledgements: The Anatomy of a Cinderella Genre.” Written Communication 20 (3): 242–268. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyland, Ken, and Polly Tse. 2004. ““I would like to thank my supervisor”. Acknowledgements in Graduate Dissertations.” Applied Linguistics 14 (2): 259–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kashdan, Todd B., Anjali Amishra, William E. Breen, and Jeffrey J. Froh. 2009. “Gender Differences in Gratitude: Examining Appraisals, Narratives, the Willingness to Express Emotions, and Changes in Psychological Needs.” Journal of Personality 77 (3): 691–730. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Jeong-Yeon. 2012. “Intimacy and Gender in Expressing Gratitude in L2.” The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 20 (2): 115–147.Google Scholar
Levant, Ronald F., and Gini Kopecky. 1995. Masculinity, Reconstructed. New York: Dutton.Google Scholar
Lii, Sheng-Ying, and Shu-Yeng Wong. 1982. “A Cross-cultural Study on Sex-role Stereotypes and Social Desirability.” Sex Roles 8 (5): 481–491. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lu, Hwei-Syin. 2004. “Transcribing Feminism: Taiwanese Women’s Experiences.” In Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society, ed. by Catherine Farris, Anru Lee, and Murray Rubinstein, 223–243. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
Marshall, Carol Sue, and Judy Reinhartz. 1997. “Gender Issues in the Classroom.” The Clearing House 70 (6): 333–338. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCullough, Michael E., and Jo Ann Tsang. 2004. “Parent of the Virtues? The Prosocial Contours of Gratitude.” In The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, 123–144. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olshtain, Elite, and Andrew D. Cohen. 1983. “Apology: A Speech-act Set.” In Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, ed. by Nessa Wolfson, and Elliot Judd, 18–35. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Prentice, Deborah A., and Erica Carranza. 2002. “What Women and Men should be, shouldn’t be, are Allowed to be, and don’t Have to be: The Contents of Prescriptive Gender Stereotypes.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 26 (4): 269–281. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schaefer, Catherine, James C. Coyne, and Richard S. Lazarus. 1981. “The Health-related Functions of Social Support.” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 4 (4): 381–406. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, Shalom H., and Tammy Rubel. 2005. “Sex Differences in Value Priorities: Cross-cultural and Multimethod Studies.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (6): 1010–1028. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shi, Yu-Hwei. 1984. “Cóng shèhuì yǔyánxué guāndiǎn tàntǎo zhōngwén nánnǚ liǎngxìng yǔyán de chàyì” [A sociolinguistic study of male-female differences in Chinese]. Jiāoxué Yǔ Yánjiù [Teaching and Research] 61: 207–228.Google Scholar
Solomon, Robert C. 1995. “The Cross-cultural Comparison of Emotion.” In Emotions in Asian Thought, ed. by Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames, 253–294. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Tsai, Chiung-Tzu L. 2006. “The Influence of Confucianism on Women’s Leisure in Taiwan.” Leisure Studies 25 (4): 469–476. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolfson, Nessa. 1988. “The Bulge: A Theory of Speech Behavior and Social Distance.” In Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, ed. by Nessa Wolfson and Elliot Judd, 82–95. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Wood, Julia T. 2008. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. Boston, Mass.: Cengage.Google Scholar
Yoosefy, Atefeh. 2014. “Gender Differences in the Expression of Gratitude by Persian Speakers.” Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research 1 (1): 100–117.Google Scholar
Zhao, Ming-Wei, and Ya-Jun Jiang. 2010. “Dissertation Acknowledgements: Generic Structure and Linguistic Features.” Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics 33 (1): 94–109.Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Bao, Kai & Meihua Liu
2024. A Contrastive Study of Lexical Bundles Expressing Gratitude in Dissertation Acknowledgments Produced by Chinese and American PhD Students of Linguistics. Sage Open 14:1 DOI logo
Ghai, Affef & Sharif Alghazo
2024. The Expression of Gratitude in English and Arabic Doctoral Dissertation Acknowledgements. Open Education Studies 6:1 DOI logo
Qi, Da & Hua Wang
2024. Zipf’s Law for Speech Acts in Spoken English. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 31:4 DOI logo
Qi, Da & Hua Wang
2024. Gender and Education: Their Role in the Zipfian Distribution of Speech Acts. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 31:3 ► pp. 210 ff. DOI logo
Jia, Mian & Yi An
2023. Language as an interpersonal marker in English dissertation acknowledgments. English Today 39:4 ► pp. 315 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.