Thanking formulas in French and Polish used in online communication (a pragmatic approach)

Thanking, belonging to expressive speech acts, according to the classification by Searle (1969), can be regarded as worth exploring due to the fact that gratitude, as a component of value systems, is as the fundamental emotion underlying social relations, and thus reflected in the language, especially fixed expressions, crucial for linguistic politeness. The aim of the present research is to compare explicit and implicit formulas (as referred to by Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2001) of the act of thanking in French and Polish. The examined material is composed of exemplary utterances retrieved from blogs, social networking sites, and internet fora. The methodology used includes studies on speech act theory (Austin 1962), typology of speech acts (Searle 1969), as well as research papers on language politeness by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1996, 2001) and gratitude (SieradzkaBaziur 2017). Moreover, the author refers to comparative studies on politeness acts conducted up to now (Romero 2000, Rădulescu and Scurtu 2003, Perez 2005, Grossmann and Krzyżanowska 2018, Meng 2012). The author classifies collected explicit and implicit utterances, juxtaposing French and Polish examples and providing an analysis based on pragmatic parameters. As a result, the author creates a corpus of utterances used for expressing gratitude along with a study on diverse thanking formulas in both languages