Internal and External Intensification of the Strategies Used for Expressing Explicit Emotional Gratitude in

Abstract- This paper deals with the strategies used for expressing explicit emotional gratitude (SEEEG) in Macedonian (fala and blagodaram) and English (thanks and thank you). More precisely, it investigates the process of intensification of SEEEG with internal and external intensifiers which affect both the syntactic and pragmatic structures of these expressions, respectively. The intensification of SEEEG is analyzed in the context of expressing gratitude for favors in particular. The study is based on a DCT questionnaire, which depicts various situations in which the respondents are prompted to express gratitude for favors. What distinguishes the selected situations one from another is the types of favor which vary according to three parameters: size (minor vs. major favor), status (potential vs. realized) and initiator (speaker-initiated vs. interlocutor-initiated favors). The study reveals that, in both Macedonian and English, the structure of SEEEG, i.e. the number of internal and external intensifiers, is heavily dependent on the type of favor the speaker is thanking for. In the case of minor already realized favors which were initiated by the speaker, the process of intensification of SEEEG is very mild or non-existent; whereas, in the case of huge favors, irrespective of whether they are realized or potential, and whether they are speaker or interlocutor-initiated, the structure of SEEEG is manifestly modified and extended with different internal and external intensifiers. Index terms: explicit emotional gratitude, external an