**4.1 Overall use of strategies**

**Table 1** shows the distribution of the three main strategies used to construct thanks utterances in the data. Overall, the participants produce 754 occurrences in the corpus. Direct expressions of gratitude are by far the most frequently employed in the examples, and they represent 407 occurrences and account for 54% of the data. There are 267 instances of indirect expressions of gratitude, which represent 35.4% of all examples and 80 tokens of supportive acts (10.6%). **Table 1** also indicates that while direct gratitude expressions are most preferred in the professor situation, indirect gratitude expressions mostly appear in the friend situation. We also see that the respondents mostly prefer supportive acts in the friend situation.


#### **Table 1.**

*Overall distribution of strategies.*

<sup>6</sup> The examples from the data are coded as follows: friend for "thanks in the friend situation," stranger for "thanks in the stranger situation," and professor for "thanks in the professor situation."
