It is known that expressing gratitude is
one of the most frequently occurring communicative acts in most languages in
the world. According to Nofsinger [1999:29], thanking is a speech act, specifically
classified under expressive, which are “expressions of the speaker’s
psychological state about something (an event, an object, a behaviour, or
whatever).” Also, the general idea is that thanks maybe viewed as unimportant
routine formulae. This paper attempts to investigate the linguistic and
semantic characteristics of gratitude expressions’ use in the English language
by Kazakhstani EFL students of higher school. In addition, the paper tries to
determine the impact of social factors on the way the gratitude is expressed
and also show the importance of thankfulness when it is missing in situations
in which it is expected. To do so, the practical analysis of gratitude
expressions’ use in oral speech has been done. Sixty people were selected from
among students of Gumilyov Eurasian National University to collect data through
a discourse completion task (DCT) adapted from Eisenstein and Bodman (1993).
The results of the study show that the most frequently used gratitude expressions
by Kazakhstani EFL students are expressions of happiness, thankfulness and best
wishes in oral speech informal style.
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