The act of thanking is one of the most distinct linguistic phenomenain Swedish. Thanking is very often reciprocated with thanking, especially in conversation closings. This is regarded as a part of the Swedish communication patterns. The ritual occures also in terminal sequences of phone calls to the Swedish Poison Information Centre, which are treated as institutional conversation. However, other interesting ways of the use of Swedish thanking can also be observed in the middle parts (so called insertion sequences) of these calls. Thanking functions there as the speaker’s acceptance of a special type of request formulated by the conversation partner.
The paper presents the possibilities of passive transformations in Swedish, German and Polish, which are confronted with each other on the basis of some constructions with the verbs tacka, danken and dziękować. The use of passive is possible with transitive verbs, which – according to the grammatical definition given by Polański (1999) – the Polish dziękować and the German danken are not. For languages where the case system is reduced, like Swedish or English, transitivity may be defined semantically: a verb is transitive if it demands any object. In the case of Swedish it is possible to transform the verb tacka into passive, an example being the passive imperative construction var tackad (eng. be thanked).
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Uber die Abhandlung „Rad och ruelse. Morał och samtalsstrategier i Giftinformationscentralens telefonradgivning" („Rat und Reue. Morał und Gesprachsstrategien in der telefonischen Beratung der Zentrale fiir Informationen iiber Yergiftungen") von Hakan Landqvist.
The present paper focuses on some frequent Swedish thank formulas that do not seem to fit the pattern of thanking – either syntactically or semantically. One example of the syntactic irregularities is tack för senast, ‘thanks for last time’ (lit. ‘thanks for lastADV’), where the prepositional phrase consists of an adverbial (not a nominal) component relating to time. On the other hand, the Swedish tack för mig, ‘thanks for me / myself’, does not conform to the semantics of thanking, as it seems to suggest that the speaker himself is the only proper reason for thanking, not – as usually expected – ‘something good’ for the speaker, i.e. an action brought about for him or her by the addressee. Some similarities with the Polish phrases for thanking (which also include adverbs but are fewer and less frequent in comparison Swedish), e.g. dziekuje za dzis, ‘thanks for today’, have also been taken into consideration. Such constructions can be analysed and explained in terms of metonymy. Furthermore, the thank formulas including the temporal adverbs seem to reflect the significance of time as a special value in the Swedish culture.