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Article published In: Historical Pragmatics today: Articles in honour of Andreas H. Jucker
Edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Jonathan Culpeper
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2] 2021
► pp. 180–201

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Responding to thanks

From you’re welcome to you bet

 | University of British Columbia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of British Columbia.

Published online: 13 October 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00052.bri
Abstract
A variety of forms serve as responses to thanks in Present-day English, albeit infrequently. Such responses minimize the debt incurred by the thanker and serve purposes of negative politeness. The history of responses to thanks has received only brief attention (Jacobsson, Mattias. 2002. “Thank You and Thanks in Early Modern English”. ICAME Journal 261: 63–80.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; 2020. Politeness in the History of English: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker. 2020. “Digital Pragmatics in English”. In Svenja Adolphs and Dawn Knight (eds), Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities, 107–124. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Most of the contemporary responses to thanks (e.g., no problem and you bet) are of quite recent origin. Those that “express pleasure” (the pleasure was mine) appear in the late-nineteenth century, while those that express “verbal acknowledgment” (all right, okay) appear in the twentieth century. The increase of minimizing responses is consonant with a trend toward negative politeness, while the loss of the deferential forms found in Early Modern English (your humble servant) reflects the rise of camaraderie politeness. Responses to thanks have also undergone “attenuation” ( 2019. “Speech Act Attenuation in the History of English: The Case of Apologies”. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4 (1): 17–38. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), evidenced by the appearance of short forms (welcome), the rise of verbal acknowledgment types, and the increasing use of such responses as conversational closers.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Dictionary evidence
    • 2.2Responses to thanks in a politeness framework
    • 2.3Sociolinguistic studies
  • 3.Diachronic corpus study
    • 3.1Historical corpora and methodology
    • 3.2Responses to thanks in Early Modern English
    • 3.3Thanking and responses to thanks in the eighteenth century
    • 3.4Responses to thanks in Late Modern English
    • 3.5Responses to thanks in Present-day English
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion and directions for future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora, primary sources and text collections
  • References
References (47)
Corpora, primary sources and text collections
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