A sociopragmatic study of the strategies and affecting factors of Chinese thanking responses

Abstract Utilizing the Labovian-style fieldwork methodology in the form of request for directions, this research delved into the nuances of thanking responses from 16 groups of 960 Chinese respondents, by meticulously controlling four distinct variables: education level (high and low), age (aged and young), complexity of thanking expressions (complex and simple), and indebtedness (knowing and telling the direction, not knowing and failing to tell the direction). The findings reveal that: firstly, the participants’ thanking responses operate within a self-contained framework, characterized by a range of pragmalinguistic forms with varying degrees of politeness and few westernized examples (returning thanks). Among them, verbally minimizing the favor constitutes approximately one fourth of the dataset, followed by verbally acknowledging the thanks and compound strategies. The non-verbal means encompass non-verbal minimizing of the favor and non-verbal acknowledgment of the thanks. Knowing/not-knowing situation-specific strategies include reinforcing the favor, returning thanks, compensating for the unmet favor, and apologizing. Secondly, the participants’ education level and age are found to have a more significant impact on the participants’ awareness of politeness in the thanking response realizations, whereas the regulating effects of the complexity of thanking expressions and their sense of the investigator’s indebtedness to them are relatively minor. The current research further illuminates the intricate connection between politeness and speech acts, especially Chinese politeness in relation to thanking responses.