Reviewers’ Illocutionary Acts in Graduate Thesis Solicited Comments as an Institutional Genre

ABSTRACT

Limited paper has analyzed the reviewers’ speech acts in graduate thesis solicited comments, which is considered as an institutional genre. This study looks at the patterns of illocutionary acts, the flaunted and/or flouted Gricean maxims, (im)politeness strategies, and the overall Philippine social and academic orientations that underpin these patterns. A total of 2,464 written utterances were secured from two departments in a local university in Metro Manila offering graduate programs. Results show that Representative and Directive dominate in the thesis reviews. They are seconded by Expressive, Commissive and Declarative. Z-test on two sample proportions shows that there are significant differences of the hits of these illocutionary acts. Comments also show the absence of appropriate punctuation marks; abbreviation; less lexical density; shorter sentences and phrases; and degree of intelligibility. All illocutionary acts are deployed to help improve the writer’s thesis. They may suggest the Filipino culture of nurturing higher education institutions, compassionate reviewers, and healthy mentor-mentee relationships. Although conducted within the parochial context of the Philippines, the merits of the study could be universal. We call for enhancing writers’ pragmatic skills and heightening of appreciation of the roles of the reviewers in the academe.

Keywords: Speech acts, Illocutionary acts, higher education, institutional written genre, Pragmatics, thesis reviews

INTRODUCTION

‘Saying something is doing something’ is John L. Austin’s (1911-1960) main premise in his posthumous monograph titled, How to Do Things with Words published in 1962. For fifty-eight years now, the speech act theory has become a leading framework in pragmatic studies, which heavily look at the different illocutionary acts of utterances. For example, studies have successfully mapped out expressive (Aguert, Laval, Le Bigot, & Bernicot, 2010), indirect speech acts (Asher & Lascarides, 2001), complaints using discourse completion task (Bikmen & Marti, 2013), and requesting speech acts (Beltran, 2014), to mention a few. Moreover, speech acts theory is used as an analytical framework when studying language use in various contexts such as in literary pieces (Bushell, 2010; Byville, 2011; Dairo, 2010) and in many discourse studies (Bot, 2012).

Studying reviewers’ comments in the Philippine context has been motivated by two considerations. First, at least to the experiences of these authors, not all reviewers express their comments orally during the viva voce. They sometimes ask the thesis writers to read their written comments. This case happens because the defense time is rather limited, ranging from 1-2 hours only. Thus, the thesis writers are encouraged to read the marginal comments and the official reports made by the reviewer-panelists. Second, understanding what these reviewers do things with words in their reviews has something to do with understanding of the practices of politeness principles; the flouting and flaunting of Gricean maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner; the culture of reviewer-writer relationship; and the overall orientation in the Philippine academic sphere.

Brown (2010) assures that not all speech acts can cut across cultures. Different languages have their distinct way of complimenting, refusing, promising and other illocutionary acts. The degree of use of politeness strategies is also culturally determined (Brown & Levinson, 1987). In like manner, different forms of implicature are products of different forms of culturally encoded politeness (Spencer-Oatey, 2000; Verschueren & Ostman, 2009). Within the bigger umbrella, “pragmatics necessarily involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular context and how the context influences what is said” (Yule, 1996, p. 1), and that “...interpretation differs from society to society, just as encoding differs from language to language’” (Leech, 2007, p. 200). Hence, the reviewers’ social actions in thesis comments are induced by specific cultural expressions, perception, and practices in the production of illocutionary acts, especially in the parochial context of the Philippines.

This study situates itself in the mooring of pragmatics, which is “the art of the analysis of the unsaid" (Mey, 1991, p. 245). It is also an art of deciphering what goes on when participants in a conversation utter things appropriately and meaningfully in different communicative speech events, either spoken or written (Birner, 2013). Above all, the art of analyzing speaker meanings is context-based, context-sensitive and context-renewing based on different speaker-hearer circumstances (Huang, 2007; Yule, 1996).

ON ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS

The speech act theory is central to studying the ‘unsaid.’ Austin (1962) grouped the speech acts into three facets, namely: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Locutionary is the actual ‘saying’ of something; illocutionary denotes the speaker’s intention of the saying something; and perlocutionary is the immediate effect and reactions of these utterances to the direct listeners. For this present study, the focus is on the illocutionary acts. Searle (1969) proposed a modified version of Austin’s work by listing five categories, namely: Declarative (brings the correspondence between the proposition content and reality); Representative (commits the speaker to the truth of the proposition being expressed); Commissive (aimed at committing the speaker to future actions); Directive (attempts the speaker to make the hearer do something); and Expressive (aimed at expressing some psychological state; the speaker tries to express the truth of the expressed proposition; affective state).

Because of semantics-syntax-pragmatics interface (Cruse, 2000; Griffiths, 2006; Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983), there is a little need to delineate the issues of speech acts theory, which are all taken care of in the conduct of this study. For example, the case of dispute when what one says and what he or she intends to convey has been a subject of discussion in recent years. McGowan, Tam, and Hall (2009) boldly challenge the skeptical stance of Bertolet (1994) that “Can you please the salt?” is not a request. According to them, this indirect speech act is both a question and a request. However, Bertolet (1994, as cited in McGowan, Tam, & Hall, 2009) in his provocative essay strongly asserts that there are no indirect speech acts at all, claiming that this utterance is only a question. Simply put, the real issue is neatly seated within these pressing questions: “What exactly does it mean for one action to be performed by performing another? Are there in fact two acts…? One act under several descriptions? Or one act with several distinct purposes?” (Asher & Lascarides, 2001, p. 228). In short, speech acts are marked with duplicity (Bach, 1994; Green, 1996; Searle, 1997). Overall, the interface can be ironed out by understanding the contexts such as when, where, and how the communicative act is being said. Although the demand for pragmatic competence may be immense, successful communication is realized through this understanding.

ON POLITENESS PRINCIPLES

Politeness is the middle core of a pragmatic perspective (Eelen, 2001). In interaction, politeness is a means of showing awareness, consideration, and sensitivity to an interlocutor’s face (Birner, 2013; Brown & Levinson, 1978; Leech, 1983; Yule, 1996), including taking care of their feelings (Gleason & Ratner, 1998). Because politeness is served to maintain harmonious and smooth social relationships (Cruse, 2000), it is likely that messages can be inferred accordingly. In fact, Cruse (2000) crisply asserts that “politeness is, first and foremost, a matter of what is said, and not a matter of what is thought or believed” (p. 362).

Leech’s (1983) six models of politeness include these maxims: Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement, and Sympathy. However, only maxims that are writer-oriented were included in this present study. They include maxim of Approbation and maxim of Tact. The former minimizes dispraise of others; maximizes praise of others, which allows solidarity between the speaker and the hearer, while the latter maxim minimizes cost to others; maximizes benefit to others. On the one hand, the maxims which are heavily applicable to the reviewers were excluded such as Generosity, Agreement and Tact maxims. Generosity maxim minimizes benefit to self; and maximizes cost to self. Therefore, it is not possible for the reviewers’ comment on the paper in order to maximize benefit to themselves. Likewise, the maxim of Agreement was also excluded because it was impossible to provide evidence that the reviewers manage to minimize disagreement or maximize agreement with themselves and the writers because these reviewers are expert-readers of the paper (Leech, 1983).

ON H.P. GRICEAN MAXIMS

Grice (1967) proposed four maxims such as the maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner. The maxim of Quality demands the truthfulness of the utterances from the speaker; the maxim of Quantity demands informative type of information, not too much or too little; the maxim of Relevance demands the significance of the utterances to the purpose of the context; and the maxim of Manner demands information that is clear-cut, unambiguous and orderly.

Verschueren and Östman (2009) and Lakoff (1990) maintain that H.P. Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) is interpersonal in nature. Because of this interpersonal rhetoric component, it is often associated with the Politeness Principle (PP), as articulated in the maxims of Tact, Generosity, Approbation and Modesty. Leech (1983) specifically highlighted the tandems of CP and PP such as Tact and Generosity in Impositive and Commissive; Approbation and Modesty in Expressive and Assertive; and Agreement and Sympathy in Assertive. This conventional implicature, which operates in the cooperative principles of Grice (1967), is likely to be nested in the reviews of graduate theses as written by the pool of experts. It is then imperative to see how thesis reviewers flout and/or flaunt some of these maxims.

ON SPEECH ACTS VIS-À-VIS CULTURE

Many studies have proved the mediating effects of culture both in written and spoken genres. In a study of metadiscourse, Munalim and Lintao (2016) report that Filipino authors show some proclivity of humility in their book prefaces, as compared to self-accolade among the American book authors. In reflection papers, Munalim (2017) shares that Filipino student-teachers show the propensity to laud their professor to crank up solidarity and sustain rapport with their professor. He continues that “student-teachers showed an inclination toward building teacher-student relationships as demanded by the culture of gratitude and sense of indebtedness in Filipino culture" (p. 162). Within this Filipino cultural matrix, Andres (1981) first shared that Filipinos adhere to the concept of pakikisama or smooth interpersonal relationship, with the ability to get along with others in order to get away with direct conflict with other people. Other Filipino social and interpersonal strategies in building rapport also include euphemism, the use of go-between and the sensitivity to personal affront such as hiya (shame/embarrassment) and amor propio (a Spanish expression for “self-love/self-esteem/self-respect”).

On the one hand, the English show some proclivity to be writer-responsible (Mohamed & Omer, 2000) in their writings. From a Chinese context, politeness is rather characterized by respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth and refinement (Gu, 1992). A Korean, on the other hand, resorts to different speech styles of politeness such as being ‘super-polite,’ formal, semiformal, polite, familiar, intimate and plain (Kroeger, 2018). All these notions echo the concept of politeness, which is a social expectation of correct behavior and good manner (Matthews, 2007), especially that (im)politeness studies and understanding the associated speech acts in the (im)polite expressions are inherent studies in “social psychology, sociology, linguistic anthropology and human communication research” (Allan & Jaszczolt, 2012, p. 617). Overall, Matsuda (1997) wraps up that the discourse community who reads, interacts and consumes the texts (and the acts) can constitute some factors in the production of utterances. Therefore, these patterns delineate how the overall cultural patterns can have immediate effects in the communication process. All these parameters can be either flaunted and/or flouted in different spoken and written modalities.

WRITING GENRE IN THIS PRESENT STUDY

The present study makes utility of a written genre in understanding speech acts, the Gricean maxims and (im)politeness principles. Although the study of speech acts under pragmatics is traditionally spoken, our study has made a crossover to the written modality. We argue that whether written or spoken, understanding the illocutionary acts and the associated Gricean maxims and politeness principles in the utterances is never a disrepute to the dynamic studies of pragmatics. With this appropriate argument in mind, these researchers define thesis review/comment as an academic, student-output-generated and an institutional writing genre with succinct comments produced by expert-reviewers. The terms thesis comments and thesis reviews are used interchangeably in this paper. Guided by this definition, it is possible that the reviewers’ comments have inherent and executable illocutionary acts, which either flout and flaunt the Gricean maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner, including some politeness strategies.

This present study may be attributed to the wide practice of written corrective feedback (van Beuningen, 2010) in written outputs. Feedback prods the students to notice the errors for future improvement of their thesis papers. This corrective practice corroborates Bitchener and Basturkmen’s (2010) study on the written feedback on thesis/dissertation written by supervisors, whose comments capitalize on the content knowledge – its accuracy, completeness and relevance; genre knowledge – the functions of different parts of a thesis; rhetorical structure and organization; argument development – coherence and cohesion; and linguistic accuracy and appropriateness. Within the practice of written corrective feedback, the use of politeness strategies may serve with the best intention of lowering the affective filter of the thesis writers. Thus, the reviewers who hold an authoritative and epistemic stance may or may not resort to some mitigating and politeness strategies. For example, the use of hedges is capable of avoiding directness, losing the elements of assertion, and softening the propositions (Fairclough, 2003). All these themes are geared toward improving the students’ thesis papers.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

With all these backdrops in mind, this present paper is an attempt to answer the following questions:

1. What illocutionary acts do the reviewers dominantly employ in graduate students’ theses?
2. What Gricean maxims are flouted and flaunted in the construction of the reviewers’ speech acts?
3. What (im)politeness strategies are employed in these illocutionary acts?
4. What do the patterns of illocutionary acts, Gricean maxim, and (im)politeness strategies say about the Philippine social and academic cultural orientations?

METHODOLOGY

The study employed a descriptive quantitative-qualitative analysis of the corpus. It counted the occurrences of the major sorts of illocutionary effects, as demonstrated in the context of the given speech acts. This is aimed to find out what specific speech acts dominate in the thesis reviews. The quantitative results were used to further explain these illocutionary acts phenomena. At the same time, a content analysis was used to see the patterns of flaunted and/or flouted Gricean maxims and (im)politeness principles. The qualitative analytical aspect, on the one hand, capitalized on the discussion of culture in the academe vis-á-vis the patterns of the major illocutionary acts, Gricean maxims and (im)politeness strategies.

After all ethical qualms had been ironed out, selected thesis comments were secured in 2018 from two departments in a local university which offers graduate programs. A total of 50 sets of reviews from 20 thesis writers were secured from Department A and Department B. It should be worth noting the use of the variable of two different departments where the corpus came from was not treated in this present analysis. This present endeavor looks at the overall patterns of illocutionary acts regardless of the nature of the academic department.  

All comments and reviews were encoded verbatim, as the original constructions have something to do with the Gricean maxim of Quantity and Manner. Consequently, the corpus formed a total hit of 2,464 illocutionary acts. The number was determined after breaking longer utterances into shorter yet meaningful illocutionary acts. For example, from “For now, I have not fully grappled with the whole study because your CHAPTER III is not clear – u [you] did not discuss the instrumentation” was separated into three acts: (1) For now, I have not fully grappled with the whole study; (2) your CHAPTER III is not clear; and (3) u [you] did not discuss the instrumentation. Also, “You print the copies and have it read, perused by the panel” was separated into (1) You print the copies; (2) have it read; and [have it] perused by the panel. In like manner, the presence of conjunction “and” such as in “Read and read and read” was separated into three separate hits of Directive.

The two authors of this present study independently rated all utterances using an Excel file and convened after each individual rating procedure. To achieve consistency of marking, all utterances with “please” polite markers were rated under the cohort of Directive, even if there was an absence of verbal phrases such as in these utterances “Citation please,” “Short discussion please,” and “APA format please.” On the one hand, the utterances like “more related studies” without “please” were rated under the Representative-Suggestion cluster. The use of modals such as “should” and “may” were also categorized under Representative-Suggestion cohort for consistency.

Moreover, Ph.D. in Language Studies students taking Pragmatics course under the secondary author were asked to rate the same utterances in order to heighten the accuracy of rating of the different speech acts. Not more than 10 occurrences of the discrepancies of the students’ answers were resolved by these authors. For example, the instances of one-word or too short illocutionary acts that flouted the Gricean maxims were resolved. The decision was guided and resolved based on the context where the speech acts were meant to convey.

To reiterate, this present study pre-defines the reviewers’ comments in graduate thesis as an institutional writing genre. The comments are characterized as terse due to space constraints of the thesis print copies. It is likely then that the maxims of Manner and Quantity are either flaunted or flouted. Because the reviewers are experts in the field, the maxims of Quality and Relevance are a given, therefore flaunted. With this background in mind, the analysis in this section only delineates the evidence of the maxims of Relevance and Quantity in this written genre, excluding maxims of Quality and Relevance. Upon inspection, all the utterances are relevant and truthful. Meanwhile, the Z test on two sample proportion was used to compare pairs wisely in order to see the significant differences between and among the different illocutionary acts. A free online resource was used for the computation of lexical density to help ascertain the flaunting or flouting of Quantity and Manner maxims.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Illocutionary acts employed by reviewers in the graduate thesis

The computation in Table 1 shows that the comments and reviews are replete with Representatives. When they are further classified into sub-categories, it was found out that Assertions/Statements/Claims have 493 hits; Suggestions with 397 hits; Questions with 321 hits; Descriptions with 230 hits; Hypothesis with 41 hits; and Clarifications with a meager of 7 hits, with a total of 1,489 hits of Representatives.

Table 1. Ranking of major speech acts

Looking closely at the sample hits of Assertions/Statement/Claims, the comments seem to have focused on the lack of writers’ cognizance of the rudiments of research writing. These are illustrated in the following [verbatim] utterances:

(1) and good researchers paraphrase not just simply quote someone's phrasing UNLESS they [sic] are definitions need to be copied verbatim.

(2) In this paragraph, I can see a lot of direct quotation.

(3) you have PLAGIARIZED some paragraphs.

(4) APA format only accepts horizontal lines, no vertical ones.

(5) this paragraph is composed of two sentence directly taken from two sources without evaluation, critiquing, etc.

(6) but I cannot see a coherent organization in this paragraph.

(7) page number is indicated when we use the direct lines from the author/s

 The pattern of Assertions/Statements/Claims is also cascaded to the cluster of Descriptions. The following [verbatim] examples include:

(1) This is vague.

(2) WRONG ENTRY

(3) This is ambiguous.

(4) This is insufficient.

(5) This is not convincing.

(6) Your paper is not perfect

(7) Incorrect in-text citation.

(8) Your entries are incorrect.

(9) Discussion of Introduction is too long.

(10) REFERENCE entries are all incorrect.

Z-test on two sample proportion was used to compare pairs wisely. Table 2 reveals that the percentage of Representative (60.43%) is significantly higher as compared to the other four speech acts (p=.0001). Likewise, Directive turns out to be used significantly higher than Declarative, Commissive and Expressive. Lastly, Declarative turns out to be significantly the least used speech act when compared to Expressive (p=.0001) and Commissive (p=.0009). In short, there are significant differences between and among the types of illocutionary acts employed by thesis reviewers. Simply put, there is a tendency for the reviewers to use more or fewer cases of the different speech acts such as Declarative, Representative, Commissive, Directive and Expressive.

Table 2. Computation of significant differences between types of speech acts

Results from the inferential statistics may echo Wardhaugh’s (2006) position that speakers (and writers) constantly make choices of many kinds of communicative social actions. The choices are afforded by the concerns about what they want to say, how they want to say, including the specific perlocutionary effects which they intend to produce. From the data, the reviewers show the proclivity to use Representative illocutionary acts in their felicitous intention to help the thesis writers improve the quality of their papers.

Flaunted/flouted Gricean maxims

The corpus-driven features within the remit of the maxims of Quantity and Manner include the interlarding features of the presence of abbreviations, incorrect capitalization, length of sentences/phrases, lexical density, intelligibility of the terse utterances and grammatical slip-ups.

With regard to the use of punctuation marks, not all comments observe the stringent use of punctuation marks. Other violations include incorrect use of capitalization such as:

(1) support your statement [verbatim; absence of a period]

(2) Compare and contrast your study and previous studies [verbatim; absence of a period]

There is also an observed pattern of abbreviation from the comments such as (1) zero in on teaching of soc [social] science, (2) touch on teaching of soc [social] science, (3) Add more reference to get rel. [related] lit and studies, and (4) Pls [please] do chapter 3, first. All these abbreviations are, of course, intelligible to the writers given the context of the papers being reviewed, and the context of the purpose of the review process. Moreover, to test the flaunting or flouting of the maxims of Quantity and Manner, the whole small corpus was subject to the computation of lexical density. The free online tool of UsingEnglish.com has computed that the overall lexical density is 39.91. This density is considered as low density.

Figure 1: Sample actual reviewer’s comments

Figure 1 illustrates the flaunting of the maxim of Manner and Quantity given the limited space of thesis papers. For example, “needs citation.” flaunts the maxim of Manner and Quantity. The use of boxed sentences substitutes the deixis pronoun “this'' or “it.” On the left side, the comment “plagiarized” also flaunts the maxim of Manner and Quantity, as it points out that the second boxed sentences have been copied verbatim, thus plagiarized from a certain PDF file, without proper attribution of Napire, the author of said document. Overall, the use of semiotic resources such as boxing serves as the contextual meaning (Birner, 2013; Yule, 1996) of the intended absence of “this/it” and “This is'' for the short comment “plagiarized.” Apparently, the thesis writers must have understood these semiotic features using some pragmatic rules and the conversational implicates.

In terms of intelligibility, it is believed that the writers understood all the reviewers’ comments in the absence and/or incorrect use of punctuation, abbreviation, limited phrases/clauses, and even in the case of ungrammatical constructions. In fact, the grammatical goofs of the reviewers were seen to be too trivial not to be understood by the writers. It is argued that these ungrammatical comments still manage to serve the communicative purposes despite their ungrammaticality, in what McGowan, Tam, and Hall (2009) call as an ungrammatical but serviceable language.

We will take these succinct comments with indicated conversational implicates in ( +> ) symbol (Huang, 2007) as examples:

(1) other processes involved!

+> The reviewer believes that there are other processes involved that the writer should have included.

(2) significance of your study for future researchers as well as faculty handling Rizal

+> The reviewer suggests that the significance of the study be included.

(3) limited studies on the use of phenomenology, specifically on teaching strategies

+> The reviewer believes that the writer has only written very limited studies with regard to the use phenomenological approach. Thus, the paper should be filled with relevant studies related to phenomenology vis-á-vis teaching strategies.

(4) steps to be followed in phenomenology

+> The reviewer suggests the steps related to phenomenology be followed.

Cases of (im)politeness strategies employed in the reviewers’ speech acts

It is important to present the sorts of Directive employed by the reviewers in their comments.

Table 3. Types of directive

Table 3 divulges that the reviewers observe a copious use of unmitigated and straightforward Directive by starting with a verb, such as in these [verbatim] utterances:

(1) Break this down into specific questions

(2) Synthesize them

(3) Tell me more.

(4) Present your findings based on the number of questions you outlined in the SPECIFIC QUESTIONS under Statement of the problem.

(5) Compare their perception when one foreigner has stayed for 1 year...

In terms of the presence of polite markers, there are 135 hits of “please” attached to these direct Directives such as in the speech acts of “Pls [please] critique and evaluate,” and “Please discuss the concepts of language pedagogy and reflective language pedagogy.” Another politeness marker is the lone lexical item “kindly” as in “Kindly expound on this by including the faculty handling SS and # of years, # of students taking Ss.” Somehow, “please” and “kindly” have diluted the impositive from the reviewers. They may function as hedging performative devices, where they can have subtle effects on the hearer/reader (Birner, 2013. Likewise, there are no instances of harsh criticism, blame, belittlement, insult and humiliation (Leech, 1983) in their attempts to ask the writers to do something.

Overall, the use of minute politeness marker “please” serves as a normative and regulative mechanism in the deployment of Directives, thereby losing the belt of reviewers’ authoritative impositive. In fact, the meaning of politeness is negotiated and renegotiated during interactions in order to uphold harmonious and smooth social relations (Cruse, 2000; Watts, 2003), hence the ensuing section with regard to social, cultural and academic orientations where the reviewers and the thesis writers belong to.

What the patterns of illocutionary acts, Gricean maxim, and politeness strategies say about the Philippine social and academic cultural orientations

Although there is some grain of negative Expressive such as “I am afraid I cannot recommend you for first defense” and “I don't like your introduction, am afraid,” the nurturing culture in the academe is conveyed in these illocutionary acts such as:

(1) good luck/Good luck on your professional headway/I wish you good luck (15 hits)

(2) all the best (7 hits)

(3) u [you] can do more/and can be more/you can do it (3 hits)

(4) congratulations for doing your job/congrats! (3 hits)

(5) thank you/thanks (3 hits)

(6) good job (1 hit)

The Expressive speech acts listed above flaunt the Sympathy maxim. According to Leech (1983), speakers have to maximize sympathy between self and others, for example, by congratulating, commiserating and thanking. In the examples assembled above, it is also clear that the reviewers do not attempt to observe too much of the flattery maxim. Even with these few hits of positive Expressive, they may support the culture of helping and nurturing thesis reviewers in the Philippine educational context. Munalim (2019) shares that the English teachers observe classroom practices, which are nurturing to all students of different cultural backgrounds. At the wider cultural context of the Philippines, Filipinos are toyed with the idea of pakikisama or smooth interpersonal relationship (Andres, 1981; Ledesma, Ochave, Punzalan, & Magallanes, 1981) even if there is an evident proof of social distance, power and ranking between and among the interlocutors (Munalim et al., 2019; Munalim et al., 2021; Munalim et al., 2022a; Munalim et al., 2022b; Munalim & Genuino, 2021).

While there are 874 hits of Directive, these hits cast light on how the reviewers project an image of authority and reviewer power to put pressure on these writers to produce quality thesis papers at the graduate level. The reviewers must have felt the same pressure because the quality of the manuscripts richly reflects on their expertise, competence, and their professional brand. What this means is that the power to ask the writers to do something is felicitous in nature. This relational, dynamic, and contestable nature of power (Locher, 2004) captures the merit and essence of the culture of nurturing thesis reviewers in the Philippine context. This is supported by the reviewers’ attempt to use politeness markers and other face-saving strategies to maintain a healthy mentee-mentor relationship, which according to Birner (2013) remains the heart of politeness theory.           

CONCLUSION

Results of the study have initially provided us good insights of the nature of graduate thesis reviews as an institutional written genre, at least in the Philippine cultural circuit. Although perhaps, the patterns of the features under study may be predictable, the merit of the paper lies in the overall discourse of Filipino cultural aspects that underpin the patterns of Representative and Directives, the Gricean maxims, and politeness strategies. These results should never be considered as a disrepute because as Moerman (1988) believes, cultures have the role when a person talks, including when he or she writes and engages in any communicative social events and actions with other social beings. These patterns may also be observed by other reviewers of different social, cultural and academic backgrounds.

The study is not without limitations. First, the reviewers’ genders were never treated because they were all female teachers. Likewise, the differences of speech acts deployed by reviewers from different disciplines were excluded. Following Bitchener and Basturkmen (2010), supervisors’ (reviewers) perceptions of feedback may vary from supervisor to supervisor, and from discipline to discipline. Third, an actual interview with the thesis advisees is desirable.  This is to look into how these comments impact on their motivation, affective filter as ESL writers, and the quality of thesis papers. The discussions assembled above boil down to re-orienting the thesis writers to the predictable nature of the review process. Failing to understand the communicative events and acts in the review process will impinge upon the quality of their papers, including upon their personal and academic morale as graduate thesis writers. Likewise, pragmatic competence in tandem with appreciation of the predictability, constraints, ‘tilted participation rights’, roles, rules, cultural, social restrictions (Arminen, 2000; Drew & Sorjonen, 1997; Gardner, 2004; Heritage & Greatbatch, 1991; Leech, 1983; O’Sullivan, 2010), including footing and alignment of roles (Goffman, 1981) in thesis reviewing and writing should be well communicated with the writers, as they buttress themselves strongly with the formidable academic writing due to the demand and rigor of graduate studies. Hence, we call for student-writers’ enhanced pragmatic skills in tandem with the cognizance of specific cultural expectations across disciplines with thesis writing requirements.

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