Appraisal Analysis of Acknowledgment Section of Doctoral Theses

Abstract

Gratitude and acknowledgement are social customs deeply ingrained in all cultures and traditions throughout the globe representing socio cultural consciousness and civic framework of society. A lack of acknowledgement in regular social life can result in various psychological and professional problems. While massive research is already available on diverse components of academic writing together with introductions, literature reviews and methodologies, confined research has focused especially on the acknowledgement sections of theses. Thereby, using appraisal theory and appraisal model, the contemporary study aims to analyze and compare the linguistic patterns in the acknowledgement sections of doctoral theses of English linguistics and literature from Pakistan, India and United Kingdom. The findings revealed that Pakistani and Indian doctoral acknowledgments employ emotionally intensified affect, moral judgment through frequent first-person and collective pronoun use (e.g., “I am deeply thankful,” “we are indebted”), spiritually and relationally oriented appraisal vocabulary referencing God, supervisors, institutions and family, emotionally sequenced coherence and complex sentence structure, whereas British acknowledgments favor restrained appreciation realized through formulaic expressions such as “I would like to thank” or “I am grateful to”, limited pronoun repetition , professionally focused, linear coherence and syntactically concise constructions within the appraisal framework.