An exploratory study of discourse conventions in the European Parliament: Thanking in Spanish, French and Dutch ; Un estudio exploratorio de las convenciones discursivas en el parlamento europeo: los agradecimientos en español, francés y neerlandés

In this paper, we analyze a small-scale corpus with Spanish, French and Dutch interventions in the plenary debates in the European Parliament, in order to verify whether there exist cultural differences in the use and the expression of the particular politeness strategy of thanking somebody. We find that thanking is more frequent in Spanish and French than in Dutch. In addition, it plays a more prominent role, e.g. because the acknowledgements are longer and receive more emphasis. Previous studies found that Dutch speakers tend to use many routine acknowledgements in contexts where there may b... Mehr ...