Abstract-Though usually seen as just marginally related to the key academic goals of establishing claims and reputations, acknowledgement as a genre is widely employed in academic discourse to express gratitude for the contribution of an individual or an institution so that writers establish a favorable academic and social position. Having considered the significance of acknowledgment texts in academic writing and the fact that little, if any, has been devoted to highlight dissertation acknowledgments in the Iranian academic context, the current study, adopting Arundale's face theory, examined the politeness strategies of 70 doctoral dissertation acknowledgments written by native speakers of Persian (henceforth NSP) and native speakers of English (hereafter NSE) in 7 disciplines representing soft sciences. The findings revealed that approximately majority of communicative moves and linguistic steps exploited by the two groups function as connection face except for cases in which writers accept the responsibility of possible errors and weaknesses of the dissertation. Of course, Persian writers, due to their cultural background, used this step more than English ones. To sum up, the study provided valuable information about the socio-cultural practices and personal identity of the writer encoded in the organizational components of this type of genre.

Irish National Drama is very sensitive when it comes to the issue of English Colonization, colonial forces, independence and the matter of post-colonial. In fact, a kind of Irish consciousness is present in all the dramas of this nation and all playwrights in this trend-even indirectly or by implication-have tried to portray these matters through their works. This study is an attempt to prove the claim that even a playwright like Samuel Beckett, whose works have been written out of the canon of Irish Literature because of living on exile, adopting another language or semi-taboo labels like Absurdism, Universality and Placlessness, can be read in light postcolinalism. To this aim, two of Beckett's plays Waiting for Godot and End Game are chosen here as the representative and put into explication.

Much has been said and written aboutNathaniel Hawthorne'sThe Scarlet Letter, its thematic significance, symbolism, archaic language and religious overtones. Yet it seems that one important thing has been ignored in the way of the analysis of this work and this isthe clues inside the story itself which will be significant when read in relation withThe sentenceabove is quoted from"the Custom House", the semi-autobiographical section, preliminary to Hawthorne'sThe Scarlet Letter. One may find such a section, a deficit or a just an old-fashioned authorialstrategy to provide enough suspense for reading. But many critics take this section as of more significance and try to investigate its relation-its autobiographical evidence-with the contextual motivations that have given Hawthorne the food for thought and consequently enough reason for the writing of The Scarlet Letter. This short paperintends to analyze in detail "republicanism" (Moss 1), as one of those motivesand tries to express the viewpoints of Hawthorne in this case.Looking at the matter of republicanism and its foundations in America, it is rather to be labeled as an eighteenth century phenomena, and its history goes back to the establishment of New England -George Washington becoming its first president in 1789-but by checking the histories, one finds that it is not till 1854 that the first American republican party is settled. In fact by 1854 the society of America was yet to bear the traces of sixteenth century Puritanism and in practice the idea of liberty had lost its color in the eyes of people. It was in such a context that writers like Hawthorne with political concerns started their work and tried to bring reformations.DeborabGossman in his article focuses on this matter and asserts that republicanism is the major concern of Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, and believes that in-order to investigate the issue, Hawthorne has a kind of pathological treatmentand chooses the societal basis of American civil life as the context to be studied-a sixteenth century Puritan Colony at Boston, Massachusetts(59). He adds that Hawthorne's question the utopian viewpoints of puritans and by that he announces even his feeling of guilt for his puritan ancestry (60). In fact, it is this writer's obsession with the ruin that Puritanism has brought to people of America and his political struggle for expiatingthatcauses him to beexpelled from his job and consequently to be obliged to work in a custom house for several years. Here at this point another important thing is worthy to be mentioned-that would reveal another motif for Hawthorne in writing that novel. In an article,Reynold asserts the fact that by mid-nineteenth century, Europe was facing a change in matter of politics-England had become a great power, Spanish and Portuguese colonizerswerein flee, Napoleon warshad broken out and Italy was dealing with a bloody liberal uproar that finally lead to thebafflement of Holly Roman Empire. He believes that all those European struggles with liberal concern had in...

Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.