Responding to gratitude in elicited oral interaction. A taxonomy of communicative options

This study explores responses to gratitude as expressed in elicited oral interaction (mimetic-pretending open role-plays) produced by native speakers of American English. It first overviews the
literature on this topic. It then presents a taxonomy of the head acts and supporting moves of the responses to gratitude instantiated in the corpus under examination, which consid
ers their strategies and formulations. Finally, it reports on their frequency of occurrence and combinatorial options across communicative
situations differing in terms of the social distance and power relationships between the interactants. The findings partly confirm what reported in the literature, but partly reveal the flexibility and adaptability of
these reacting speech acts to the variable context in which they may be instantiated. On the one hand, the responses to gratitude identified
tend to be encoded as simple utterances, and occasionally as complex combinations of head acts and/or supporting moves; also, their head acts show a preference for a small set of
strategies and formulation types, while their supporting moves are much more varied in content and form, and thus situation-specific. On the other hand,
the frequency of occurrence of the responses to gratitude, their dispersionacross situations, and the range of their attested strategies and formulations are not in line
with those reported in previous studies. I argue that these partly divergent findings are to be related to the different data collection and categorization procedures adopted, and the different communicative situations
considered across studies. Overall, the study suggests that:responses to gratitude are a set of communicative events with fuzzy boundaries, which contains core (i.e. more prototypical) and peripheral (i.e. less
prototypical) exemplars; although routinized in function, responses to gratitude are not completely conventionalized in their strategic or surface realizations; alternative research approaches may provide
complementary insights into these reacting speech acts; and a higher degree of comparability across studies may be ensured if explicit pragmatic and semant
ic parameters are adopted in the classification of their shared object of study.