Dissertation Acknowledgements in Cameroon English: A Semantic Analysis

The acknowledgement section of a thesis is a genre within the academic discourse community. It gives the graduate student an opportunity to express their gratitude toward a number of addressees after the completion of a rather tedious research process. This genre has attracted a lot of interest in research in academic writing in English in the Outer Circle. Some of these studies have focused on their generic structure (Al-Ali, 2010, Hyland 2004), their expressions of gratitude (Hyland and Tse 2004) or their semantic structures (Cheng 2012). These features have, however, been conspicuously neglected in the literature in Cameroon English. Given that genre is the study of language use in a given sociocultural or academic context, this study examines 200 dissertation acknowledgements (herein after DAs) collected from six major disciplines in three renowned state universities in Cameroon. Our objective here was to do an in-depth analysis of all the thanking acts of the various texts that constituted our corpus in order to bring out the dominant semantic features that were used in expressing thanks. As far as semantic categories are concerned, our data revealed about 1494 thanking acts with seven categories of thanking, 1308 of which were explicit and 186 of which were implicit. These thanking strategies, however, varied greatly from one discipline to another. For the purpose of this study, the strategies were simply identified as strategy 1 to strategy 7 according to how they were semantically structured and strategy 8 comprises implicit thanking acts. The different semantic strategies were classified following Cheng’s 2010 coding scheme though with modifications depending on what our analysis revealed.