Thanking actions: interactional variation in Swedish-language service encounters in Sweden and Finland

Abstract

Abstract The social action of thanking is an everyday practice in most cultures and, as such, it has been the focus of contrastive studies of different languages, cultures, and countries. This article focuses on the sequential organisation of the action of thanking in Swedish, which is a pluricentric L1 in Sweden and Finland. The study’s data are actions of thanking realised through the Swedish interjection tack [‘thank you’] in service encounters in the two countries. By analysing the sequential position of actions that are similar in form, their potentially different interactional functions can be examined. The actions of thanking are described in two different sequential positions in relation to adjacency pairs, as either responsive or initiating thanking actions. After an initiating thanking action a response is conditionally relevant or expected. A contrastive analysis of these responses reveals that in 73 % of the cases they constitute another action of thanking with the word tack. In Finland, the proportion amounts to 81 % and in Sweden it amounts to 65 %. This contrasts with my earlier study on thanking in medical encounters in the two varieties (Grahn 2019), where a slightly higher proportion of thanking actions as responses to initiating thanks was reported in Sweden than in Finland. In sum, sequential position is highlighted as critical for the management of interpersonal relations and the organisation of this institutional setting.