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This book synthesizes previous work on thanking, politeness and Japanese pragmatics and crystallises the theoretical underpinnings of thanking, how it is realized linguistically and the social meaning and significance of this aspect of Japanese communication.

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1. Introduction 2. Review of data elicitation methods 3. Revealing patterns: Descriptive empirical norms (Studies 1 and 2) 4. What Japanese native speakers actually do in thanking episodes in naturally occurring telephone conversations 5. Implications of the studies in relation to teaching Japanese language and current debate on face and politeness

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Jun Ohashi is a lecturer at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include cross-cultural pragmatics; communicative acts of thanking and their social meaning in Japan and Australia; gendered and generational variation of speech act realization; and cross-cultural investigation of public signs and exhortations. Jun is the author of various articles and book chapters.

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