The language of gratitude: An empirical analysis of acknowledgments in German medical dissertations

Abstract Acknowledgment sections are a rich but underused resource for understanding how language is used for social purposes (such as expressing gratitude and communicating social relations networks), and how conventions and patterns emerge in this process. This paper presents a usage-based case study combining qualitative and quantitative methods for analyzing a dataset of >300 acknowledgment sections from medical dissertations written in German. In our quantitative analysis, we gauge keywords and key n-grams and assess the relative position of recurrent words in each text. Our analysis shows that this text type has developed clear conventions, with acknowledgments in the professional domain being followed by a usually smaller set of expressions of gratitude associated with the private domain. In addition, our quantitative analysis suggests recurrent patterns that can be linked to specific socio-pragmatic functions. For instance, an analysis of n-grams attested in text segments associated with the professional vs. the private domain shows some differences with regard to the typical patterns chosen in those segments. Our analysis also raises a number of future research questions, thus showing that acknowledgment sections are a highly interesting object of study that deserve to be investigated in more detail.