The Speech Act Of "Thanking" In Chinese

Thanking is an important social interacting act. Just as apologizing, commanding, congratulating and promising, it has close relation with people's daily life. Meanwhile thanking is a highly frequent speech act in our daily lives. Hence examining into how people express thanking properly is of great significance for understanding human communication. Unfortunately previous research documents have few studies on the speech act of thanking. As an attempt, this study looks into the linguistic structures and functions of thanking.This thesis adopts an utterance-analysis approach. The utterances are of both spoken and written nature, and of three origins: First, various Chinese contemporary literary works, because using works from different regions, ages, and genders may keep the materials typical and comprehensive, and this, in return, may help us fully perceive the linguistic structures of the speech act of thanking in Chinese. Second, typical communicating contexts such as receiving gifts or being praised. Such utterances may help us understand the uses of various thanking strategies. Third, media, newspapers, and the Internet. Such utterances help us focus on the newest and quickest data.The study reports the following findings: 1) Thanking involves a complex process. There are two kind of thanking formation---favor-leading thanking and non-favor-leading thanking. 2) Thanking contains three levels of linguistic structures: sentential, lexical, and conversational. 3) Thanking entails two major strategies---direct thanking and indirect thanking. The Chinese culture is of inner-continent feature and prefers indirect thanking instead of direct thanking. 4) There are four basic functions in the act of thanking: thanking, refusing, satirizing, and attention-catching. 5) The thanking act is also constrained by several factors. Some of the comparatively steady factors include gender, nationality, and concrete contexts such as time, place, etc. These various factors operate together to restrict every concrete thanking activity, during which time subjective factors persist throughout the whole process of the thanking activity, while culture, the objective factor, helps us properly understand and express thanking.Theoretically, the present study enriches our knowledge about the speech act of thanking, and practically, helps us, especially Chinese as a foreign language learners properly express thanking in Chinese, establish a good interpersonal relationship, and a harmonious social atmosphere.