Benefiting from a corpus based design, this paper attempts to compare acknowledgments across three academic disciplines written by Turkish and Iranian authors in terms of the formulaic language employed. Studies into the academic register have commonly chosen the research article (RA) and its various sections as their object of investigation. Despite the multitude of studies carried out on RAs, there are still many aspects of this register which merit closer analysis. One relatively understudied section of the RA is the acknowledgments. The findings reveal a difference in the rate of multiword expressions used by the two groups of writers. It was found that Iranian authors were inclined to overuse a certain set of formulaic expressions; whereas, Turkish authors generally avoided using these expressions in their texts. Possible explanations for this observed difference are discussed in detail in the paper.

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