acknowledge

Ashrita always acknowledges his teacher in his record-breaking attempts.

Is the underlined "acknowledge" natural here? Should I say" Ashrita acknowledges his teacher's support" instead?

According to my dictionary, acknowledge is followed by something like "support, help etc.". Can I use acknowledge somebody as "I thank somebody".


Thanks

Jason

Any of those are possible.

"I couldn't have achieved this without Mrs. Gillespie" acknowledges her and her support.

If the sentence below expresses your intended idea, I think it would sound more natural:

Ashrita always acknowledges his teacher's in his record-breaking attempts.

Technically, you can say, "I acknowledge your support," although that sounds quite formal to me. Even "I thank you for your support" is more formal than "thank you for your support."

In other sentences "acknowledge" works well. For instance, one that comes to mind is "I'd like to acknowledge you for your participation in the project." (The context in that case might be that the speaker will mention the other person's name at a formal dinner ceremony or in a meeting.)

There are other situations as well of course. A lot of this will depend on a case-by-case basis of what sounds natural in a given sentence.

Hope that helps a bit. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Academic Writing

If the sentence below expresses your intended idea, I think it would sound more natural:

Ashrita always acknowledges his teacher's in his record-breaking attempts.

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Surely that's not the OP's intended idea at all.

Ashrita is making the attempts – not his teacher.

Rover

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Academic Writing

If the sentence below expresses your intended idea, I think it would sound more natural:

Ashrita always acknowledges his teacher's in his record-breaking attempts.

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I agree with Rover. I'm pretty sure the OP meant that it is Ashrita who is making the record-breaking attempts and when he does so, he always acknowledges his teacher (presumably in a speech either before or after the attempt).

Good point Rover and emsr2d2. It looks like I did misread the original. I had seen Ashrita as a female name before (now looking at Google images, I see that it can be male or female), so I think that might have affected my interpretation. Thank you for clarifying! (And, in that case, to address the original question, I think "acknowledges" works fine.)