An Investigation of Generic Structures of Pakistani Doctoral Thesis Acknowledgements

This paper investigates Pakistani doctoral thesis acknowledgements from genre analysis perspective. A corpus of 235 PhD thesis acknowledgements written in English was taken from Pakistani doctoral theses collected from eight different disciplines. HEC Research Repository of Pakistan was used as a data sources. The theses written by Pakistani native PhD students, and submitted to Pakistani HEC recognized universities during the last five years, from 2008 to 2012, were selected for the collection of acknowledgements data. Swales' (1990) conception of genre analysis in its modified form was followed for the investigation of genre moves. In the initial stages, Hyland's (2004b) coding scheme was utilized but due to broad socio-cultural differences between Hyland (2004b) and the present study, some other models such as Al-Ali (2010) were also sought for the coding of certain generic components. The analysis revealed seven moves along with certain sub-units or steps. These seven moves and their steps resulted from socio-cultural norms, academic traditions and institutional practices of acknowledgement writing in Pakistan.