“Face” in Retrospective: A Survey of Thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-1766075/v1

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“Face” in Retrospective: A Survey of Thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1766075/v1

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published 01 May, 2023

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Despite being often criticized, the notion of face has recently started to be applied in diachronic pragmatic investigations. These studies focus on speech acts such as explicit directives, requests, apologies, and terms of address. This trend suggests that “face” can be used as a valid tool to understand speakers’ behaviors in historical contexts. This study also uses the notion of face to investigate the speech act of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German, filling a long-standing gap in the literature. The results of this study suggest that, although the expression of gratitude was common and perceived in a positive way in these two societies, this speech act could only be found when the addresser was in a lower social position than the addressee. On the one hand, these findings provide evidence to the claim that the effects of a speech act on the speaker’s or hearer’s face are mostly determined by the situation in which a specific behavior takes place. On the other hand, they also point to the strictly hierarchical structure of the Old Saxon and Old High German societies.

politeness

face

German

Since the publication of Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage in 1987, the concept of “face”, understood as “‘the public self-image that every member [of a society] wants to claim for himself” (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 61), has been extensively used in numerous investigations to study pragmatic variations among different speaking communities (O’ Driscoll, 2017:86). Locher and Watts (2005) argue that politeness theory and the concept of face provide “a breadth of insights into human behaviour which no other theory has yet offered” (9). In his review of the use of “face”, O’ Driscoll (2017) concludes that, although overused, the notion of “face” remains a powerful tool for the investigation of the interpersonal aspects of interaction (112). Given its proven usefulness in analyzing speakers’ interactional behavior, it does not come as a surprise that the notion of “face” has started to be used in diachronic studies as well (Jucker & Kopaczyk, 2008:434). Many of these studies start from a specific pragmatic phenomenon that has been extensionality studied from a synchronic perspective and search for attestations of that behavior in historical texts. The focus of these investigations are often speech acts such as explicit directives (Kohnen, 2008, Author), requests (Busse, 2002b; Del Lungo Camiciotti, 2008), apologies (Jucker and Taavitsainen, (2008), thanking (Jacobsson, 2008, Jucker, 2020) and terms of address (Burnley, 2003a; Hunt, 2003; Bentivoglio, 2003).

These studies, although cautious in their claims due the problematics related to historical pragmatic analyses¹, have all demonstrated how the notion of “face” can help gain insight on specific behavioral patterns in different historical contexts.

Like the aforementioned investigations, the current work also aims to shed light on a particular speech act from a diachronic perspective. More specifically, this study focuses on the speech act of “thanking”, defined as the act in which a “speaker expresses positive feelings to the addressee, who has done a service to the speaker” (Norrick, 1987:285), in the earliest stage of the history of German. This study has been motivated by various reasons. First, and to the best of my knowledge, German has not been the focus of many diachronic pragmatic investigations to this date. The only one available is the study by Author, which looked at directives in Old High German and Old Saxon. Comparing the results of this investigation with those obtained by a similar study by Kohnen (2008) in Old English, the author concludes that also in Old Saxon and Old High German, negative politeness did not play a major role. Consequently, this paper fills a gap in the literature in this sense, adding to the body of investigation of diachronic pragmatic investigation in the history of German. Second, since speech acts of thanking are considered to be a threat to the speaker’s negative face, as the latter acknowledge and accepts a debt (Brown and Levison, 1987: 210), diachronic studies on this speech act will provide additional information on “face work” in Old High German and Old Saxon. Third, as claimed by Jucker and Kopaczyk, pragmatic historical research is still insufficient and “much more work needs to be done to explore continuities between these [pragmatic] phenomena across time” (2008:434). Hence, this paper explores the speech act of thanking, laying the foundation to a better understanding of the dynamic involved in the expression of gratitude starting from its manifestations in the earliest stage of the history of German.

The research questions that are guiding this investigation are as follows:

What are the main linguistic elements used to express “thanking” in Old Saxon and Old High German?

What can the speech act of thanking tell us about “face work” in Old Saxon and Old High German?

The first question aims to identify the available linguistic inventory available to Old Saxon and Old High German speakers to express gratitude. The data obtained to answer this question will show which nouns, verbs, or adjectives were used in these two speaking communities when their speakers engaged in thanking each other. It will also lay the foundation for further comparative studies that investigate the same speech act in different historical periods of the history of German, such as Middle and Early New High German. The second question has the goal to understand the potential face-threatening force of the act of thanking in both Old Saxon and Old High German, illustrating also the possible power dynamics between those addressers and addressees involved in this speech act.

The structure of the present study is as follows. In Section 2, I first offer a review of the literature of the studies that investigated the speech act of thanking historically. Then, I address the studies that looked at pragmatic phenomena in the history of German. This section has the goal to provide an overview of the available data about politeness and face work in Old Saxon and Old High German. In Section 3, I provide a detailed description of the methodology, i.e., the corpus used, and the data collection. I also discuss the limitations of this study. Section 4 presents the results of the analysis of the instances of thanking found in the corpus. Section 5 delivers a discussion of the main findings across Old Saxon and Old High German, answering the two main research questions that are guiding this investigation. In the last section, I offer some preliminary conclusions and directions for further research.

¹ I will discuss more in detail the limitations of historical pragmatic studies in the last part of the methodology chapter.

2.1 Thanking in the History of English

The expression of thanking has been defined by Searle (1969) as a speech act resulting from specific steps taken by both a speaker and a hearer: the speaker, after benefiting from an act done by the hearer, feels grateful and expresses this feeling to the latter (63). Norrick, (1987) defines this speech act as the act by which a “speaker expresses positive feelings to the addressee, who has done a service to the speaker” (285). According to Leech (1983), this speech act is intrinsically polite, and it establishes more intimacy between the two interlocutors (84).

Since the feeling of gratitude is common across many cultures, the act of thanking used as a way to manifest such a feeling was also found in many different languages (Aijimer, 1996; Sneider, 2005). Although the core function of this speech acts is to convey gratitude towards someone, its cultural ubiquity can result in different or additional meanings, depending on the culture in which it is used. For instance, while in American English the form “thank you” indicates gratitude, in British English it is rather perceived as a formal marker in conversations (Hymes, 1972). The speech act of thanking can even acquire other pragmatic functions. For instance, in Modern English, the forms thanks and thank you not only convey gratitude towards a benefactor but are used to signal the closing of a telephone call or the end of a transaction with service operators (Jucker, 2012:127).

When analyzed historically, the function as a discourse marker observed in Modern English cannot be found in earlier stages of the history of English. Jacobsson (2002) analyzes how frequent adverbial intensifiers were used in the expressions of thanking in Early Modern English. After his analysis, he concludes that “the Early Modern English thank you and thanks [...] retain their main function of expressing gratitude, thus not yet having developed the function of marking the segments of interactions” (74). To similar conclusions arrives Jucker (2020), claiming that, in the eighteenth century, expressions of thanking were used only to convey gratitude, overlapping sometimes with the acknowledgement of obligation towards the hearer (128). These diachronic studies show how, with the passing of time, the speech act of thanking has acquired additional interpersonal functions, which were not present in the 17th and 18th centuries.

2.2 Pragmatic variation in the history of German

In German, the only study that addresses pragmatic phenomena historically focuses on directives (Author, year). Author (year) conducts a study on four different manifestations in Old Saxon and Old High German: explicit performatives, constructions with the Old Saxon modal verb skulan and its Old High German counterpart sculan combined with the pronouns with the second person singular and plural; constructions with the verbs latan (in Old Saxon) and lazan (in Old High German) in the imperative plus infinitive verbs and combined with a pronoun in the first-person plural (let’s plus infinitive verbs); the constructions with the modal verb skulan/sculan combined with the pronoun in the first-person plural; and constructions with Old Saxon and Old High German nouns with the meanings of ‘need’ and ‘necessity’: ‘not/nót’ and ‘tharf/thurft.’ The findings of this study are, to some extent, remarkably similar to what Kohnen (2000, 2008) finds for Old English. Kohnen (2002; 2008) showed that only a restricted number of verbs were used in explicit performatives and these verbs were biddan, læran, halsian, bebeodan, and beodan. In Old Saxon and Old High German, there was also a restricted number of verbs that were used in explicit commands and requests and these verbs were also biddian/bitten (to ask), gibiodan/gibiotan (to command), hetan/heizan (to command), lerian/leren (to instruct), and thiggian/diggen (to ask). Kohnen (2000a) also notices a lack of verbs expressing “suggest/advise” in the Anglo-Saxon texts (307). To this regard, Author finds that only the Old High German corpus contained two verbs with the meaning of “to advise” (ratan and bifelahan) and none of them were found used as an explicit performative. Such resemblance reflects the strictly hierarchical structure of the Old Saxon and Old High German societies whose speakers preferred those verbs that, when used as explicit performatives, specified the power relationships between the interlocutors. Author (year) concludes that the Old Saxon and Old High German speaking community, like the Anglo-Saxon, could have been also ‘beyond politeness’, or limited to some positive politeness.

A study on the speech act of thanking, like the current work, will likely add to the available data offered by the study of Author, providing more information to understand “face work” in the earliest stage of the history of German.

In the next section, I provide a detailed description of the corpus and the methodology used to collect the data. I also discuss some of the limitations of this study.

3.1 The corpus

This section outlines the methodology used in this study. First, it offers a brief description of the corpus from which the instances of thanking in both Old Saxon and Old High German were gathered. Secondly, it illustrates how these instances were collected in the first place. In the last part, it discusses some possible limitations.

The current work is an analysis of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German based on a corpus of texts selected from the Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch². The Old Saxon texts are the Hêliand, the Old Saxon Genesis, and the Kleinere Altsächsische Denkmäler (Short Old Saxon Memorials). The Old High German texts are the Evangelienbuch, the Tatian, Notker’s Boethius (De consolatione Philosophiae), Notker’s Psalter, Notker’s Martianus Capella, and Kleinere Althochdeutsche Denkmäler (Short Old High German Memorials).

While the aforementioned Old Saxon texts were included because they are the only ones available, the Old High German texts listed in the previous paragraph were selected to create a corpus that could provide a similar number of words from both secular and religious writings. The number of Old High German texts included was also established in order to avoid having a study that could have resulted overwhelmingly in Old High German.

Tables 1 and 2 show the distribution of the texts per text type:

Table 1

Texts’ distribution in the Old Saxon corpus
Prose	Verse
Altsächsische Denkmäler (99,89% of the collection)	Hêliand; The Old Saxon Genesis; Altsächsische Denkmäler (0,11% of the collection)
Total words: 18,474 (20,1%)	Total words: 73,828 (79,9%)
Secular	Religious
Altsächsische Denkmäler (36%)	Hêliand; The Old Saxon Genesis; Altsächsische Denkmäler (64%)
Total words: 6,697 (7,2%)	Total words: 85,605 (92,8%)

Table 2

Texts’ distribution in the Old High German corpus
Prose	Verse
Althochdeutsche Denkmäler (91%) Tatian Notker’s Boethius (De consolatione Philosophiae) Notker’s Psalter Notker’s Martianus Capella	Das Evangelienbuch Althochdeutsche Denkmäler (9%)
Total words: 334,688 (79,6%)	Total words: 85,261 (20,4%)
Secular	Religious
Althochdeutsche Denkmäler (7%) Notker’s Martianus Capella Notker’s Boethius (De consolatione Philosophiae)	Althochdeutsche Denkmäler (93%) Notker’s Psalter Das Evangelienbuch Tatian
Total words: 175,649 (41,8%)	Total words: 244,300 (58,2%)

As shown in Table 1, the 92, 8% of the Old Saxon corpus consists mainly of religious texts. Table 2 shows that, in the Old High German corpus, many of the texts included are prose texts (79,6% of the corpus). In comparison to Old Saxon, these texts are more equally divided into secular (41,8% of the corpus) and religious texts (58, 2% of the corpus).

3.2 Data collection

The first research question of this study focuses on the repertory of vocabulary or syntactic structures used to express gratitude. Hence, the data was collected using the lemma search function provided by the corpus. The instances were found searching for the corresponding lemmas of the Modern German nouns Dank (thank) and Dankbarkeit (gratefulness); the verbs danken (to thank), verdanken (to thank), sich bedanken (to thank); and the adjective dankbar (grateful).

3.3 Limitations of this study

The current study has some limitations. First, and as stated by Jucker and Kopaczyk (2008), our understanding of politeness and face work is based on synchronic observations of interactional behaviors among speakers of different communities. Applying the current notions of politeness may be like forcing concepts, ideas, and beliefs that don’t have a corresponding representation in earlier historical periods. That is the reason why the results of this study cannot be interpreted as a comprehensive report of the act of thanking in both Old Saxon and Old High German. They may be seen as an attempt to scratch the surface of complex interpersonal behaviors between the speakers of these two speaking communities. Second, any historical analysis, not only in the field of pragmatics, must deal with the scarcity of material and corpora that can be used in such investigations. The quality of these historical sources can also hinder data collection and interpretation.

Despite the limitations stated in this section, I however believe that currying our pragmatic studies is possible and a much-needed endeavor, as these investigations are a powerful tool to go back in time and gain a deeper understanding on the historical dimension of speakers’ interactional behavior.

In the next section, I present the search results from both varieties.

² The total number of words for both Old Saxon and Old High German is 511,807.

4.1 Verbs of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German.

In this section, I present the results for Old Saxon. Table 1 shows the number of instances of nouns, and adjectives of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German

Table 3

Verbs, nouns, and adjectives of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German
Modern German	Lemma	Instances	Total
Dank	Olat	3	45
Dank	Thank/Dank	41	45
Dankbarkeit	Dankbaride	1
danken verdanken bedanken	gidankon	6	32
danken verdanken bedanken	thankon/dankon	26	32
dankbar	-	-	-

The corpus had a total of 44 instances that corresponded to the Modern German noun Dank. The majority of these referred to the lemmas thank (in Old Saxon) and dank (in Old High German), while three of those corresponded to the lemma olat³, which was found in Old Saxon only. The noun Dankbarkeit was found only once in Old High German with the lemma dankbaride. Examples (1), (2), (3), and (4) show instances of olat, thank, dank, and dankbarige as found in the corpus:

(1) ôlat sagde themu the these uuerold giscôp
Thank said to the one that this word created
(Hêliand, XLIX, 4091)

(2) Thuo sagde hieuualdande thanc
Then said he to the ruler thank
(Hêliand, VI, 475)

(3) fater thanc tuon thir
Father, thank do (I) to you
(Tatian, 118)

(4) dere tûgidône mînna, mámminti, réhtgerni, dancbaride
of the competence, love, gentleness, justice, gratitude.....
(Vera Fidis, 147, 23)

The instances of the nouns ôlat, thank, and dank were found in sentences in which the speaker is addressing a hearer in a higher position. This hearer is, in the first two instances, God himself, identified as the creator in the first one. In the third example, the addresser is Jesus (called heilant – the savior) talking to his father. In the fourth example, the word for gratefulness is found in a list with other good qualities, suggesting that, in this cultural context, gratitude is perceived as a positive feeling.

The Modern German verbs danken, verdanken, sich bedanken resulted with a total of 32 instances. Twenty-six of these matched with the Old Saxon lemma thankon and the Old High German lemma dankon, while 6 of them with the lemma gidankon, which was only found in Old High German. Examples (5) and (6) show two instances of this verb from the corpus:

(5) endi gode thancode, sagde them ôlat
and god thanking, said (he) to him thank
(Hêliand, LVI, 4633)

(6) thaz thir es gód githanko
That to you it god would thank
(Evangelienbuch, 20, 6)

Example (5) from the Hêliand is particularly interesting because, in the same sentence, the author uses the verb “to thank” together with a noun with the meaning of “thank” (ôlat). This instance could be interpreted as a likely indication about the preferred way to express gratitude in Old Saxon. As shown in Table 1, the number of instances of the noun “thank” are higher in comparison to the number of instances of the verb “to thank” in this variety. This could suggest that Old Saxon speakers preferred to use a noun instead of a verb to convey their gratitude. This choice may also be related to the fact that present participles, which is the form in which “to thank” appears in (5), at this stage were still perceived as adjectives instead as verbs (Kotin, 2003, 2009; Concu, 2016, 2022). Thus, the use of the noun ôlat to intensify the expression of gratitude. Example (6) shows an instance of the verb gidankon, which was only found in Old High German. No instances of the Modern German adjective dankbar were found in the corpus.

Table 4 shows the detailed distribution of each of the Old Saxon and Old High German lemma per text topic (religious vs. secular):

Table 4

Verbs, nouns, and adjectives of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German according to the text topic
Lemma	Old Saxon		Old High German
Lemma	Religious	Secular	Religious	Secular
Olat	3	-	-	-
Thank/Dank	16	-	23	-
Dankbarkeit	-	-	1	-
gidankon	-	-	6	-
thankon/dankon	2	-	21	2
Total	21		51	2

Table 4 shows the distribution of the lemmas related to the speech act of thanking according to the text’s topic. Many of the instances for both Old Saxon and Old High German were found in religious texts. While for Old Saxon this finding could be related to the fact that the number of secular texts correspond only to the 7,2% of the entire corpus, the data from Old High German may be a reflection of the frequency of the speech acts of thanking in which speakers expressed their gratitude to God or to Jesus in the Christian texts.

Two of the instances of the verb “to thank” were found, however, in secular texts, namely in Notker’s Martianus Capella⁴, as shown in examples (7) and (8):

(7) dô dánchota sî ze_êrest athanasię
Then thanked she firstly the immortality
(Martianus Capella, 20, 6)

(8) Únde íro mûoter dánchota si mít ópfere
And her mother thanked she with a sacrifice
(Martianus Capella, 130, II)

In both these examples, the addresser is the protagonist of the story, Philologia. In both (7) and (8), she is thanking someone in a higher position than herself. In her status as a mortal woman who lives in a world inhabited by gods, in (7) she thanks the figure of Immortality, and in (8) her own mother. These two examples, although taken from secular texts, follow the same patterns of the examples illustrated until now: the expression of gratitude always comes from a speaker in a lower social position than the hearer. This could suggest that the act of “acknowledging a debt” towards a benefactor and, consequently, committing an act that is a threat to the negative face of the speaker was common in situations in which the addresser was in a lower position than the addressee.

4.2 Addressers and Addresses in the Speech Acts of Thanking.

To get a better understanding of the power dynamic between the speakers and hearers involved in the instances of thanking found in the corpus, Table 5 offers a detailed account of which figures were found in the roles of addresser and addressee throughout the corpus:

Table 5

Addresser and addressee in the thanking speech acts in Old Saxon and Old High German
Addresser	Addressee
Jesus	God
Angel Gabriel
Abel
Author
Disciples	Jesus
Philologia	Immortality
Philologia	Mother

Most of the addressers found in the corpus are religious figures (Jesus, the Angel Gabriel, the displaces) and, among them all, the figure of Jesus is the only one who was found in both the roles of addresser, as shown in (9) and addressee, as shown in (10):

(9) after thésen werkon gistuant er góte thankon
after these deeds began er got to thank
(Evangelienbuch, 34, 15)

(10) joh thánkont es mit wórte Kriste themo wírte
and thank they it with words Christ the Lord
(Evangelienbuch, 10, 17)

Example (9) was found in the narration of Jesus’ death on the cross. Jesus’s loud cry caused an earthquake that destroyed a temple close to where he was crucified. While on the cross, Jesus also thanks God for his help and dies afterwards. In his role as the son of God, Jesus recognizes his father as his benefactor and acknowledges a debt towards him, expressing gratitude through a speech act of thanking. In (10), the disciples are thanking Crist during the well-known episode of turning water into wine. The addressers involved in this instance are also in a lower position than the addressees and are explicitly recognizing a debt towards the latter. Interestingly, in (10), the author also gives information about how the act of thanking is carried out: with words. Similar instances were found in the same text, as shown in (11) and (12):

(11) thirthánkon mit wórton joh mit wérkon
you I thank with words and with deeds
(Evangelienbuch, 24, 91)
(12) bigóndun mit githánkonthodrúhtine thánkon
they started with thoughts then the lord to thank
(Evangelienbuch, 6, 49)

In both (11) and (12) we find the addressers in a lower position than the addressees: Jesus thanking his father in the first, and the disciples thanking Jesus in the second. In these two instances, the speech act of thanking is accompanied by additional information about how this action was carried out by the addressers. In (11), the expression of thankfulness is complemented with words and deeds, and in (12), with thoughts of gratitude. These instances may suggest that the act of thanking counted on other linguistic expressions and rituals other than the ones found in the corpus which are referred to only indirectly here.

As shown in Table 5, the non-religious figures that were involved in the speech acts of thanking were Philologia⁵ and “author.” The latter denomination indicates the instances in which the author of the text (in this case, Otfrid in his Evangelienbuch) is referring to or directly engaging in the act of thanking, as shown in (13) and (14):

(13) thesscaler góte. thankon
of that should he god thank
(Evangelienbuch, Ad Ludowicum, 25)
(14) thessculun wirgótethankon
of that should we god thank
(Evangelienbuch, Ad Ludowicum, 30)

Examples (13) and (14) were found in the dedication to the king Ludwig with which Otfrid opens his gospel harmony. In (13), he is referring to the king himself and how he should thank God for the victories he was able to collect during his realm. In (14), Otfrid is exhorting the readers to thank God again because of the peaceful times in which the audience and himself are living. In these two examples, the addressers that are supposed to express gratitude (the king Ludwig and the audience) are here too in a lower position than the intended addressee.

Since none of the instances in the corpus had a speaker addressing a hearer in a lower social position, we can assume that these power dynamics – addresser in a lower position than an addressee- were the default set up in which the act of thanking took place in Old Saxon and Old High German.

In the next section, I discuss the results and answer the research questions of this paper.

³ At the time of writing this paper, the author has not yet found any historical information about the origins of the word “ôat” in Old Saxon.

⁴ Notker’s Martianus Capella is the only known translation of the Latin writer Martianus Minneus Felix Capella. The text makes use of an allegorical writing style and metaphors and narrates the events around the wedding of the god Mercury, the symbol of intelligence, and a human woman, Philologia, who signified learning and acquisition of knowledge (Glauch, 2000).

⁵ The instances with Philologia have been already discussed – see examples (7) and (8).

This section offers a discussion on the speech act of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German. The discussion is based on the instances found in the corpus, which will be also used to answer the research questions stated in the introduction.

The corpus of texts selected contained a total of 77 instances between nouns and verbs related to the expression of gratitude, and most of them were found in religious texts. The analysis of these instances makes possible to answer the first of the two research questions that have guided this investigation:

1. What are the main linguistic elements used to express “thanking” in Old Saxon and Old High German?

The lemma research function of the Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch showed the following linguistic elements that were used to express gratitude: the nouns ôlat, dank/thank, dankbaride, and the verbs gidankon and thankon/dankon. These elements represent an overview of the linguistic inventory available to Old Saxon and Old High German speakers while engaging in the act of thanking. The nouns that corresponded to the Modern German Dank (thank) were slightly more popular than the verbs, especially in Old Saxon. In this variety, one instance was found in which both the verb of thanking and the noun for thank appeared in the same sentence. Consider again example 5:

(5) endi gode thancode, sagde them ôlat
and god thanking, said (he) to him thank
Hêliand, LVI, 4633)

On one hand, the fact that the verb thankon was in the present participle, which at the time was still used as an adjective (Kotin, 2006, Concu, 2022) could have prompted the author to add the noun ôlat to reinforce this speech act. On the other hand, this combination could imply that, especially in Old Saxon, speakers preferred to express gratitude using nouns instead of verbs.

The noun dankbaride was found only once in the corpus, as shown in example (4):

(4) dere tûgidône mînna, mámminti, réhtgerni, dancbaride
of the competence, love, gentleness, justice, gratitude.....
(Vera Fidis, 147, 23)

Nonetheless, this instance can help us understand how the feeling of gratitude was perceived in this historical period. To do that, I utilize an approach similar to the one used in the so-called “first-order politeness research.” This type of investigations focuses on how the word politeness and (un)polite behavior were described in historical texts with the aim to understand what speakers considered to be good or bad manners in different social contexts (Watts, 2003; Kasper, 2003; Jucker, 2020). In a similar way, looking at how the word gratefulness was (directly or indirectly) used in historical sources can help us understand how speakers perceived this feeling and the related speech act of thanking. In the corpus used in this study, the word dankbaride was found in a list together with other good qualities and feelings such as competence, love, gentleness, and justice. The inclusion of gratitude in this list suggests that the feeling of gratitude was perceived as a positive feeling, similar to the other elements listed in the same sentence.

Another interesting pattern observed in the Old Saxon and Old High German sources is that, sometimes, these texts contained additional information on the way the speech act of thanking was carried out. Consider again examples (10), (11), and (12):

(10) joh thánkont es mit wórte Kriste themo wírte
and thank they it with words Christ the Lord
(Evangelienbuch, 10, 17)

(11) thir thánkon mit wórton joh mit wérkon
you I thank with words and with deeds
(Evangelienbuch, 24, 91)
(12) bigóndun mit githánkon tho drúhtine thánkon
they started with thoughts then the lord to thank
(Evangelienbuch, 6, 49)

The expression of gratitude in these instances is accompanied by words, deeds, and thoughts of gratitude. The examples in which the speech act of thanking is carried out with “words” could hint to the existence of an inventory of linguistic elements used to thank that is wider than the one found in this corpus. Unfortunately, these elements are referred to only indirectly. The same could be said about the times in which the speech act of thanking is carried out with “deeds.” Were there particular rituals that were common while expressing gratitude? These instances seem to imply that, but, again, these deeds are not explicitly described. The times in which thanking is realized with “thoughts,” we are also left to wonder about the contextual behaviour of the addressers while engaging in the expression of gratitude. These instances, however, although vague, deliver a picture of this speech act as a behavior that was commonly used among Old Saxon and Old High German speakers.

2. What can the speech act of thanking tell us about “face work” in Old Saxon and Old High German?

The analysis of the addressers and addressees (Table 5) that were involved in the speech acts of thanking shows that the expression of gratitude was always initiated by an addresser that was in a lower position than the addressees. As already mentioned, the speech act of thanking is said to be a threat to the speaker’s negative face, as the latter acknowledges and accepts a debt towards a benefactor (Brown and Levison, 1987: 210). Expressing gratitude then results in a speaker that is willingly situating themselves in a situation of disadvantage. As the instances found in this corpus indicate, this voluntary action could only be carried out in a setting in which there was an asymmetrical relationship between speaker and hearer, with the latter in a higher social position than the first. Such a finding provides further evidence to O’Driscoll (2007,), according to whom, “effects on face are radically situational” and “they cannot be properties of illocutions” (469). On the one hand, the speech act of thanks was common among Old Saxon and Old High speakers and perceived as a positive quality in these two societies, as the instances found in this corpus seem to suggest. On the other hand, when and by whom this speech act was carried out was determined by the situation in which the addresser and the addressee found themselves. As discussed in the review of the literature, the Old Saxon and Old High German societies were strictly hierarchical and such a characteristic was also reflected in the way speakers used explicit performatives. These two communities preferred, indeed, speech acts that directly specified the power relationships between the interlocutors. Commands always came from addressers in a higher social position, while begging and asking for favors were always stated by addressers in a lower social status. Hence, threatening the negative face of an addressee was not an issue in this case. The problem was, as the instances found in this work seem to suggest, when the addressers had to willingly threaten their own negative face. Such an act was probably not common or nor even possible in such hierarchical societies and not accepted in higher social ranks.

The goal of this paper was to analyze the speech act of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German focusing on the linguistic inventory found in the selected corpus. The data showed the presence of verbs and nouns to express gratitude and how this act was positively perceived in these two communities. The data also illustrated in which contexts it was possible to find speakers engaging in this particular speech act: the addresser was always in a lower social position than the addressee. Threatening their own negative face with the explicit recognition of being in debt with someone was then only possible in this specific setting. The finding of this study seems again to point to a strictly hierarchical society in which social status played a major role and some behaviors were associated with them.

Interesting at this point would be to track the situational evolution of this speech act in Middle and Early New High German to see if that, when, in the history of German, this speech act was normalized also among those speakers in a higher social status.

Competing interests: The author declares none

Data availability: The data is available at https://www.deutschdiachrondigital.de/

Ethical approval: No needed since this study uses a data set which is freely available in the public domain at https://www.deutschdiachrondigital.de/

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“Face” in Retrospective: A Survey of Thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German

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Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Review Of The Literature

2.1 Thanking in the History of English

2.2 Pragmatic variation in the history of German

3. Methodology

3.1 The corpus

3.2 Data collection

3.3 Limitations of this study

4 Results

4.1 Verbs of thanking in Old Saxon and Old High German.

4.2 Addressers and Addresses in the Speech Acts of Thanking.

5. Discussion

6. Preliminary Conclusions

Declarations

References

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