PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In the present report, we provide the manual used for coding RESPONSES TO THANKS in Namibian English and English English in the research project “A Pragmatic Profile of Namibian English: Exploring norms of communicative behaviour in a multilingual ecology” (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG). It is a coding manual which, although based on existing work in Variational Pragmatics, has been dedicatedly developed for coding DCT data elicited from speakers of Namibian English via the Questionnaire on Speech Actions in English (see https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2986102). Existing coding categories have been tested and updated based on the data in a bottom-up fashion by a team of coders, resulting in the manual reproduced here. Its applicability to other varieties of English has been exemplarily tested by coding English English data gathered in the UK, too. The report briefly introduces the project, the research instrument used for data gathering, defines the speech act RESPONSES TO THANKS and provides a detailed account of the decisions underlying the coding system and individual coding categories. It is intended as a resource for fellow researchers to apply to their own speech act data, and as a documentation of the process underlying quantitative findings presented in the context of our project.