A Study On The Social Function Of "Thank You"

"Thank you" is used frequently in daily life,and the function of "thank you"gradually develops and evolves following the pace of the times,which goes beyond the scope of typical thanking language and produces a series of special and valuable social functions.Such evolution enriches the speech form of interpersonal interaction,but the misuse of "thank you" will hinder the smoothness of interpersonal interaction to a certain extent and bring some difficulties to the teaching of polite language in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.At present,some progress has been made in the research on the function of "thank you",but insufficient of systematics.On the basis of previous studies,this paper tried to comprehensively investigate the social function of "thank you":conducted a preliminary classification of the turn of "thank you" under the guidance of speech act theory,then judged and explained the social function of "thank you"scientifically under the guidance of politeness theory,impoliteness theory and face theory,finally validated all types of the function of "thank you" technically and systematically under the guidance of experimental phonetics and multimodal analysis theory.This paper conceptually focused on the following aspects:First,when "thank you" appears in the turn of conversation,only one type or more types of illocutionary acts are expected.For the former,"thank you" plays the role of thanking language;for the latter,the social function of "thank you" will be influenced by other illocutionary acts.Therefore,this paper classified other illocutionary acts in the turn of "thank you",including refusal,request,inquiry,statement and refutation,some of which can be further subdivided.Second,"thank you" does not perform the same function in different types of turn.Based on politeness theory,impoliteness theory and face theory,this paper explored the similarities and differences of the social function of " thank you " when it occurs simultaneously with different illocutionary acts.It was found that the social function of"thank you" can be summarized as positive politeness function,negative politeness function,end-turn function,negative impoliteness function and mock politeness function.Finally,based on the experimental phonetics and multimodal theory,this paper made a detailed analysis and research on the prosodic form and body language of "thank you" with different functions,and examined both the receive’s response and the synonymous form.Results showed that there are significant differences in the whole intonation or in the pitch,intensity and length between "Xie 1" and "Xie 2" among different functions of "thank you".Furthermore,the speaker’s expression,body posture and body distance are helpful to convey the social function of "thank you",and the response form of the recipient will also reflect different functions of "thank you".In addition,specific functions of "thank you" have corresponding categories and quantities of synonymous forms.