Do Persian and English Dissertation Acknowledgments Accommodate Hyland’s Model: a Cross-Linguistic Study

In recent decades, genre analysis has attracted many researchers' attention. The present study was to observe the differences in generic structure of doctoral dissertation acknowledgements texts written by native speakers of Persian (NSP) and native speakers of English (NSE). To this end, 80 Persian acknowledgement texts and the same number of English dissertations acknowledgement texts were selected. The model relied on in the current study was Hyland’s (2004) model. After analyzing each text the main moves and their steps were extracted and the frequencies of each one were calculated and compared. Also, chi-square test was applied to check the meaningfulness of the differences. The result revealed a high degree of match between the two groups in exploiting most moves and steps. Also, the two groups employed the reflective move and accepting responsibility step in a statistically meaningful manner. In addition, a new step called ''thanking God'' step was discovered throughout this study which the difference in using this step between NSP and NSE was statistically significant.