“Thank bloody God it’s Friday”: A Local Grammar of Thanking

Abstract

This paper presents a local grammar of thanking in English, aiming to further demonstrate the feasibility of using a local grammar approach to account for speech acts and also to contribute to the on-going development of corpus pragmatics. The corpus used for the study is compiled of those texts categorised as ‘Spoken—conversation’ in the British National Corpus. Conventionalised realisations of thanking are identified and used as search terms to retrieve automatically instances of thanking. The retrieved instances are then manually examined to make sure that all instances to be analysed have the illocutionary force of thanking. The subsequent analyses suggest 7 functional labels that are needed for a local grammar description of gratitude expressions and identify 29 local grammar patterns. The implications and applications of research on local grammars of speech acts are discussed. It is concluded that local grammars can contribute substantially to the description of speech act realisations, and therefore more research on local grammars of speech acts are desirable and valuable.