Academic English has been the focus of attention for many researchers in the past few years. However, academic spoken English has not received much attention, and those who have selected this field have mainly taken academic lectures and conference paper presentations as their corpus. In this article, a new classification of spoken academic genres is presented, which is formed by classroom genres, institutional genres and research genres. Among these, institutional genres have been selected as a corpus, specifically the Honoris Causa (...) acceptance speech, which has not yet been analysed. We believe that this genre has specific characteristics, mainly related to purpose and structure. In this study, we demonstrate that Honoris Causa speeches follow an established structural pattern and that they always have two purposes: a common one, namely, to express gratitude for the award; and a secondary one that varies from one speech to the other. It is also proved that common rhetorical patterns relate the speaker, the topic and the secondary purpose of the speeches. (shrink)