Pragmatic nativisation of thanking in South Asian Englishes

Abstract

As South Asian Englishes have been studied regarding their structural levels but only few studies have focused on their pragmatics, this study investigates thanking strategies in the spoken parts of the British, Indian, and Sri Lankan components of the International Corpus of English. The paper answers the questions: Do variety, speaker age and gender, context formality, position within the speaker turn, and the presence of a benefactor, intensifier, and reason influence the choice between thank and thanks; and what implications do these findings have for the notion of pragmatic nativisation? In a multifactorial analysis, a conditional inference tree identifies age, benefactor, intensifier, and variety as significant predictors while a random forest highlights the importance of variable interactions with variety.