Worlds of gratitude: A contrastive study of acknowledgement texts in English and Italian research articles

Studies in EAP and contrastive discourse analysis have greatly multiplied in recent years, producing countless descriptions of academic text types in different settings. The following paper seeks to fill a small and yet not insignificant gap in the extensive literature devoted to the research article. It examines the socio-pragmatic construction and textualization of scholarly Acknowledgements in English and Italian journals from a genre-analytic perspective, drawing on a corpus of 100 such texts. Points of difference or similarity between corpora and academic cultures are explored with special attention to such issues as generic complexity and staging, personal involvement and peer-reference, authorial responsibility and pragmatic appropriacy. The findings suggest that generic frameworks reverberate across linguistic borders but also reinforce the national proclivities of the disciplinary communities they serve.