sabine jautz
dr. sabine jautz
PhD project: "Thanking in English. A corpus-based study on the use of expressions of gratitude across different varieties and genres"
The study is devoted to the use of thanking formulae in different genres and in different varieties of English. Research on thanking, politeness, variational pragmatics and media discourse serve as theoretical background. Issues relating to gender and status are also examined in an exploratory part of the study.
The data under investigation is taken from the spoken component of the British National Corpus and the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English. Even though not (yet) tagged for speech acts or communicative functions, corpora have come to be recognised as an important source of data in pragmatics research, because they provide large amounts of naturally occurring data, are easily searchable and can be analysed according to frequency, text types or demographic factors. Searching the two corpora for a list of thanking formulae resulted in a database of about 900 thanking formulae which were analysed quantitatively, but also qualitatively, drawing on conversation/ discourse analytic frameworks.
The empirical analysis is divided into three parts, exploring the data from different perspectives. In the first part, the data is analysed as a whole regarding formal realisations of thanking formulae, the functions they serve, their status in different models of politeness and also with reference to some characteristics of the speakers involved. The second part is dedicated to an analysis of the aforementioned aspects in British as compared to New Zealand English. As some of the aspects examined (e.g. a discourse-organising function of expressions of gratitude) become especially apparent in media texts such as radio phone-in conversations, a third perspective is introduced, comprising an analysis of a subcorpus of data originating from media contexts. The findings of the different parts are compared to each other and related to previous research in the relevant fields.
You can find her publication here.
References
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