The speech acts of thanking and responses to thanking in spoken Polish – corpus-based study

Agnieszka Cyluk

Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna TWP w Warszawie

Abstract

The article presents the findings of the corpus-based research of the speech acts of thanking and responses to thanking in spoken Polish. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate what linguistic formulas and strategies are routinely employed by the Polish people to thank and respond to thanking. The data for the analysis were taken from the spoken part of the PWN Corpus of Polish. The analysis of the spontaneous conversational data provided us with invaluable insights on how the polite speech acts in question are used in everyday interactions. The findings of the corpus-based research should be useful for learners of Polish as a foreign language as they will help them avoid unnatural or inappropriate expressions in a particular situation.

Keywords:

thanking, responses to thanking, speech acts, polite linguistic formulas