Cover not available
Article published In:
(Co-)Constructing Interpersonally Sensitive Activities Across Institutional Settings
Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez Reiter
[Pragmatics and Society 7:4] 2016
► pp. 664–692

Patterns of thanking in the closing section of UK service calls

Marking conversational macro-structure vs managing interpersonal relations

 | The University of Manchester
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.
Keywords: institutional discourse, service calls, conversation, interpersonal relations, thanking
Published online: 20 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.7.4.07mos
References (29)
Aijmer, Karin. 1996. Conversational Routines in English. Convention and Creativity. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Antaki, Charles. 2002. “‘Lovely’: Turn-initial High-grade Assessments in Telephone Closings.” Discourse Studies 4 (1): 5–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aston, Guy. 1995. “‘Say ‘”Thank You”’: Some Pragmatic Constraints on Conversational Closings.” Applied Linguistics 16 (1): 57–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and J. Wade French. 1981. “Telephone Goodbyes.” Language in Society 101: 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Emerson, Robert M., and Sheldon L. Messinger. 1977. “The Micro-politics of Trouble.” Social Problems 25 (2): 121–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erman, Britt, and Ulla-Britt Kotsinas. 1993. “Pragmaticalization: The case of ba’ and you know .” Studier i modern språkvetenskap 101: 76–93.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman. 2010. Talk in Action. Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell. 1971. “Sociolinguistics and the Ethnography of Speaking.” In Social Anthropology and Language, ed. by Edwin Ardener, 47–93. London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Jautz, Sabine. 2013. Thanking Formulae in English. Explorations Across Varieties and Genres. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karttunen, Lauri. 1971. “Implicative Verbs.” Language 47 (2): 340–358. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1979. “Activity Types and Language.” Linguistics 171: 365–399. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Murphy, James. 2015. “Revisiting the Apology as a Speech Act. The Case of Parliamentary Apologies.” Journal of Language and Politics 14 (2): 175–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Okamoto, Shinichiro, and W. Peter Robinson. 1997. “Determinants of Gratitude Expressions in England.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16 (4): 411–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey. 1995. Lectures on Conversation, vol. 21. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis, vol. 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A., and Harvey Sacks. 1974. “Opening up Closings.” In Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, ed. by Roy Turner, 233–263. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack. 2010. Conversation Analysis. An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yngve, Victor. 1970. “On getting a word in edgewise.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 61: 567–578.Google Scholar
Cited by (9)

Cited by nine other publications

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. DOI logo
Orthaber, Sara
2023. Introduction. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Orthaber, Sara
2023. Conclusions. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 335 ff. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
Orthaber, Sara
2023. On (Im)politeness. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 11 ff. DOI logo
Boginskaya, Olga
2022. Dissenting with conviction: boosting in challenging the majority opinion. International Journal of Legal Discourse 7:2 ► pp. 257 ff. DOI logo
Koole, Tom & Lotte van Burgsteden
2022. Actions and Identities in Emergency Calls. In Action Ascription in Interaction, ► pp. 256 ff. DOI logo
Grahn, Inga-Lill
2021. Thanking actions: interactional variation in Swedish-language service encounters in Sweden and Finland. Sociolinguistica 35:1 ► pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
Murphy, James
2019. Questioning. In The Discursive Construction of Blame, ► pp. 47 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 december 2024. 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.