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**134**

**137**

**Chapter 8**

**Abstract**

*Bernard Mulo Farenkia*

research on Cameroon French pragmatics.

[4]), politeness strategies [5], discourse markers [6], etc.

politeness, variation

**1. Introduction**

Thanking in Cameroon French

This chapter discusses aspects of Cameroon French pragmatics, with focus on gratitude expressions. The chapter presents the taxonomy of patterns employed by Cameroon French speakers to express their gratitude to friends, strangers, and superiors/professors. Cameroon French speakers are found to express their gratitude directly or indirectly using a wide range of linguistic and pragmatic strategies, and the expressions employed mostly occur in speech act sets, which generally involve combinations of direct and indirect gratitude expressions and supportive acts. The results also reveal the use of nominal address terms to modify the illocutionary force of gratitude expressions. Overall, the linguistic and pragmatic choices made by Cameroon French speakers vary according to degree of familiarity and power distance between the interlocutors. The study adds to a growing body of

**Keywords:** Cameroon French, postcolonial pragmatics, expression of gratitude,

Cameroon French has been the focus of many studies, and the research carried out so far has mainly explored phonetical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and semantic features. In recent years, the scope of research on Cameroon French has been expanded considerably, with scholars also giving more attention to pragmatic and discursive aspects of this postcolonial variety of French. The topics examined so far include address terms [1], speech acts (e.g., compliments and compliment responses [2], greetings [3], invitations and expressions of sympathy

The present study focuses on the analysis of pragmatic and linguistic choices made by Cameroon French speakers when expressing gratitude in three different situations. The speech act of giving thanks has been studied in many different languages and mostly within the framework of speech act and politeness theories. While there is an abundant literature on thanks in languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, etc., there is a need to look at the impact of region on the realization of thanks in different regional varieties of the same language. With respect to French, the studies currently available mainly focus on the variety spoken in France. This paper is an attempt to extend the scope of research on thanks in French by examining the ways in which Cameroon French speakers express their gratitude in different situations. The study is based on data collected by means of a discourse completion task questionnaire that was administered to two
