THANK YOU FOR TAKING YOUR RUBBISH HOME: PREMATURE THANKS IN RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH PUBLIC SIGNS

Abstract

Рremature thanking is viewed as a common feature of public signs within urban linguistic landscapes, strategically used to deter types of anti-social behavior that do not pose an immediate existential threat and are not, in and of themselves, unlawful. Public signs featuring premature gratitude deviate signifi cantly from the routinized language patterns typical of institutionalized settings, yet they display substantial commonalities in terms of function and underlying discourse mechanisms in both Russian and English. This may suggest that premature gratitude is a universally exploited feature across many urban linguistic landscapes. The complexity of discourse factors involved in this linguistically creative strategy necessitated the use of functional-pragmatic analysis, as well as content and contextual analysis methods. A key fi nding from the analysis is that public sign texts utilizing premature gratitude are secondary in nature, resulting from the pragmatic compression of a common sequence of directive and expressive speech acts. On the surface, this compression involves assigning the expli cit thanking formula the role of a performative act, which is exploited by the speaker (i.e. the agent of a public institution) solely for relational work, rather than modifying the utterance’s illocutionary function, defi ned as an institutionalized injunction. The relational work in question draws upon implying indebtedness to the addressee (i.e. the less powerful participant) and using the thanking formula as a gesture of politeness within the ongoing power relationship.