I investigate patterns of usage of thanking formulae in the closing section of a corpus of 94 telephone calls made by tenants to a UK housing association. The data suggest that unilateral thanking is the norm when calls are institutionally and interactionally unmarked. In contrast, mutual thanking correlates mainly with the presence of interactional problems of various kinds, or, in a few cases, with features that are not problematic as such, but simply interactionally marked given the nature of the activity.
When initiated by agents rather than by callers, thanking is frequently hearable as conveying an apologetic stance. Participants thus seem to orient to different thanking patterns as devices which may be used either to mark the preceding interaction as an instance of ‘business-as-usual’ or, if such is not the case, to restore interpersonal harmony or index awareness that aspects of the preceding interaction have otherwise deviated from situational expectations.
1995 “ ‘Say ‘”Thank You”’: Some Pragmatic Constraints on Conversational Closings.” Applied Linguistics 16 (1): 57–86.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987Politeness. Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Button, Graham
1987 “Moving out of Closings.” In Talk and Social Organisation, ed. by Gene Button and John R.E. Lee, 101–151. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Clark, Herbert H., and J. Wade French
1981 “Telephone Goodbyes.” Language in Society 101: 1–19.
Coulmas, Florian
1981 “ ‘Poison to Your Soul’. Thanks and Apologies Contrastively Viewed.” In Conversational Routine. Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 69–91. The Hague: Mouton.
Emerson, Robert M., and Sheldon L. Messinger
1977 “The Micro-politics of Trouble.” Social Problems 25 (2): 121–134.
Erman, Britt, and Ulla-Britt Kotsinas
1993 “Pragmaticalization: The case of ba’ and you know.” Studier i modern språkvetenskap 101: 76–93.
Goffman, Erving
1967 “On Face-Work. An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction.” In Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior, 5–45. Chicago: Aldine.
Heritage, John
1984Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman
2010Talk in Action. Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Heritage, John, and Sue Sefi
1992 “Dilemmas of Advice: Aspects of the Delivery and Reception of Advice in Interactions between Health Visitors and First-Time Mothers.” In Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 359–417. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, Dell
1971 “Sociolinguistics and the Ethnography of Speaking.” In Social Anthropology and Language, ed. by Edwin Ardener, 47–93. London: Tavistock.
1971 “Implicative Verbs.” Language 47 (2): 340–358.
Lerner, Gene, H.
2004 “Collaborative Turn Sequences.” In Conversation Analysis. Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 225–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levinson, Stephen C.
1979 “Activity Types and Language.” Linguistics 171: 365–399.
Levinson, Stephen C.
1983Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lindström, Anna, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
2013 “Affiliation in Conversation.” In Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 350–369. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
1997 “Determinants of Gratitude Expressions in England.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16 (4): 411–433.
Sacks, Harvey
1995Lectures on Conversation, vol. 21. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson
1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735.
Schegloff, Emanuel A.
2007Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis, vol. 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A., and Harvey Sacks
1974 “Opening up Closings.” In Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, ed. by Roy Turner, 233–263. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Sidnell, Jack
2010Conversation Analysis. An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Woods, Catherine J., Paul Drew, and Geraldine M. Leydon
2015 “Closing Calls to a Cancer Helpline: Expressions of Caller Satisfaction.” Patient Education and Counseling 98 (8): 943–953.
Yngve, Victor
1970 “On getting a word in edgewise.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 61: 567–578.
Cited by
Cited by 9 other publications
Boginskaya, Olga
2022. Dissenting with conviction: boosting in challenging the majority opinion. International Journal of Legal Discourse 7:2 ► pp. 257 ff.
Grahn, Inga-Lill
2021. Thanking actions: interactional variation in Swedish-language service encounters in Sweden and Finland. Sociolinguistica 35:1 ► pp. 243 ff.
Koole, Tom & Lotte van Burgsteden
2022. Actions and Identities in Emergency Calls. In Action Ascription in Interaction, ► pp. 256 ff.
Murphy, James
2019. Questioning. In The Discursive Construction of Blame, ► pp. 47 ff.
Orthaber, Sara
2023. Routine Calls for Information and Request Emails. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 97 ff.
Orthaber, Sara
2023. Introduction. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
Orthaber, Sara
2023. Conclusions. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 335 ff.
Orthaber, Sara
2023. Non-routine Calls for Information and Request Emails. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 173 ff.
Orthaber, Sara
2023. On (Im)politeness. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 11 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.