“Face” in Retrospective: The use of “thanks” and “to thank” in Old Saxon and Old High German

Abstract

Despite being often criticized, the notion of “face” has recently begun to be applied in diachronic pragmatic investigations on directives, requests, apologies, and terms of address. The present study also uses the notion of face to investigate the use of Danke ‘thanks’, Dankbarkeit ‘thankfulness’, and danken ‘to thank’ in expressions of gratitude in Old Saxon and Old High German, laying the foundations to a better understanding of the speech act of thanking in the history of German. The data suggest that, although the manifestation of gratitude was common, the expressions containing Danke, Dankbarkeit, and danken could mostly be found when the addresser was in a lower social position than the addressee. The same situation was observed when these nouns and verbs were used with the meaning of “to reward” and “to praise.” These findings provide evidence to the claim that the effects of a speech act on the speaker’s or hearer’s face are mostly situational rather than being an intrinsic property. They also suggest that, in strictly hierarchical societies such as the Old Saxon and Old High German ones, addressers would threaten their own negative face only if they were in a lower social position than the addressees.