A Corpus-based Study On Thanking Speech Act In Chinese

Thanking speech act is an indispensable communicative activity in people’s dailylife. Meanwhile, it is a commonly seen polite act to maintain harmonious interpersonalrelationship between people as well. As a pervasive phenomenon in Chinese culture,thanking speech act has various structures and functions and the users of thankingspeech act differ in their strategies.This thesis conducts a corpus-based study on thanking speech act in Chinese. Thecorpus used is Corpus of Chinese Language (CCL) which is for native Chinese speakers.Through data analysis of the Chinese corpus, the structures, strategies and functions ofthanking speech act are concluded, which gives us a deeper understanding of thankingspeech act in Chinese.The study has the following findings:1）The structures of thanking speech act inChinese are mainly classified into lexical-level thanking and sentence-level thanking.Lexical-level thanking is subdivided into simple thanking, thanking with intensifier,thanking with object. Sentence-level thanking is classified into declaratives,exclamations and rhetorical questions.2） Chinese people adopt two main strategies ofthanking speech act: explicit thanking and implicit thanking. The latter is embodied infive subdivided strategies: thanking by showing care, thanking by apologizing, thankingby blaming, thanking by supposing and thanking by praising.3）Thanking speech act inChinese has four functions: expressing gratitude, expressing euphemistic refusal,expressing sarcasm, and functioning as closing remark.4) The use of explicit thankingspeech act exceeds that of implicit speech act, which is influenced by cultural factor. AsChinese culture lays stress on the interpersonal relationship, the speech acts people useare more polite.Theoretically, the present study promotes the researches on speech act theory andface-saving theory; practically, it enriches our understanding of thanking. Expressingthanking properly is of great significance, thus it is necessary for us to be clear ofthanking in Chinese. In this way, we can avoid embarrassments led by communicationfailure, establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationship and facilitating communications.