Patterns of thanking in Asian Englishes

Abstract Drawing on data taken from the Hong Kong, Singapore, India and the British components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), the study presents a local grammar-based investigation into the patterns of thanking across the four selected varieties of English. It aims to add to our understanding of thanking and its associated sociocultural norms in the four societies and to enrich the toolkit for researching speech acts in world Englishes. Overall, the investigation reveals a mixed picture of the ways in which thanking was performed by speakers of the three Asian varieties of English, suggesting that their speech act performance was shaped by both local politeness norms and target language cultural conventions. Methodologically, the study shows that local grammar can facilitate the quantification of speech act realisations across varieties of English, thereby offering a viable method for examining speech acts in world-wide Englishes.