‘Thank you so much Mystery Solved’: Online Expressions of Gratitude by IMDb* Members

The majority of research on expressions of gratitude has generally examined data gathered from discourse completion tasks, corpus, and questionnaires, while a few studies have analyzed data from naturally occurring talk or text (Yuan, 2001). Expanding the research on expressions of gratitude to a computermediated communication (CMC) context, this study investigated the discourse-pragmatic characteristics of 100 messages from one of the Internet movie database (IMDb) discussion boards, ‘I Need to Know’. Drawing on the speech act theory (Searle, 1976), and relational work (Locher & Watts, 2005), this study aimed to explore users’ expressions of gratitude when closing conversation as an indicator of polite (if not, politic) behavior of relational work within a potentially “impolite” asynchronous online context as compared to corpora data from Global Web-based English (GloWbE) for other CMC genres and to Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC) for spoken examples.Accordingly, thanking formulae were found to be in line with GloWbE, COCA, and BNC, though there were differences in terms of the frequencies of use. As for strategies and functional sequences, the findings support the literature on face to face (Eisenstein & Bodman, 1986; 1993) and CMC politeness (Darics, 2010). Lastly, the current study underscored that regardless of the lack of close social ties between the interactants and highly anonymous nature of the context, relational work is still significant for IMDb members