From the point that people learn how to speak and onwards, they learn how to use language. The author of this study is looking for a pragmatic perspective study on how American, Chinese, Korean, and Thai speakers choose phrases to thank each other. These cultural groups of people whom this paper has focused on, may simply use thank you to thank each other, but the author is curious to know whether there are any other phrases used, by American, Chinese, Korean, and Thai people, when they feel thankful to one another.

Moreover, the author is interested in a cross-linguistic perspective, which includes a contrastive approach to American-English, Chinese-Mandarin, South Korean, and Thai. The reason for choosing a cross-cultural approach is because the author hypothesizes that the Asian speech communities may show in-group specific commonalties when expressing thanks, and will differ from Americans’ patterns in doing so. Xiao (2013) mentioned that cultures emerge from geographic situations, social backgrounds, and cultural patterns. Thus, in the continent of Asia, people may share cultural patterns in this society, as well as their subcultures in China, South Korea, and Thailand.

This study aims to identify thanking words that may represent culture-specific politeness concepts. Intachakra (2011) reports that in social life, there is a practice of politeness, which analyzes a politeness of how people perform, representing that face is equivalent to the image or personhood. In another sense, thanking words may be one of the acts that people use to demonstrate good manners to one another.

The author will illustrate the differences of thanking phrases which may apply in the movie. High School Musical was chosen to identify how four different countries express the use of thanking words. Thus, the transcripts will support this paper by clarifying the gratitude expressed in several social situations with a cross-cultural lens among American, Chinese, South Korean, and Thai people.

               This finding will provide evidence from a survey in order to back up the collections of data, and demonstrate how participants use American English, Chinese-Mandarin, South Korean, and Thai using thanking phrases. The survey was filled out by university-external native-speakers of each of the languages included in this study. Eventually, the author wishes that this study may be useful to anyone who seeks to explore thanking words and practices of thanking within four different languages and cultural contexts.

 

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