Expressions of gratitude by Hong Kong speakers of English: Research from the International Corpus of English in Hong Kong (ICE-HK)

Abstract

Expressions of gratitude often occur as functional lexical chunks such as thanks and thank you (Coulmas, 1981). In this paper, I will focus on the use of such units and longer formulaic sequences of gratitude such as thanks a lot and thank you very much, relying on data from the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-HK). The results show that Hong Kong speakers of English do not employ the wide variety of thanking strategies that has been investigated in previous literature. Their expressions of gratitude are usually brief, with thanks and thank you being the commonest forms of gratitude expression. These forms are frequently used as closing signals; they often constitute a complete turn. Repetitive gratitude formulae and expressions of appreciation of the interlocutors (both in a single turn and across turns) are exceedingly rare, which suggests that the Chinese may be too reserved to express their gratitude openly and explicitly. Responses to an act of thanking seem to be infrequent in ICE-HK and only a few strategies are represented. The paper also considers the pedagogical implications of the way this function can be acquired in a second/foreign language with the help of the corpus findings. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.