Abstract
It is known that expressing gratitude is one of the most frequently occurring communicative acts in most languages in the world. According to Nofsinger [1999:29], thanking is a speech act, specifically classified under expressive, which are “expressions of the speaker’s psychological state about something (an event, an object, a behaviour, or whatever).” Also, the general idea is that thanks maybe viewed as unimportant routine formulae. This paper attempts to investigate the linguistic and semantic characteristics of gratitude expressions’ use in the English language by Kazakhstani EFL students of higher school. In addition, the paper tries to determine the impact of social factors on the way the gratitude is expressed and also show the importance of thankfulness when it is missing in situations in which it is expected. To do so, the practical analysis of gratitude expressions’ use in oral speech has been done. Sixty people were selected from among students of Gumilyov Eurasian National University to collect data through a discourse completion task (DCT) adapted from Eisenstein and Bodman (1993). The results of the study show that the most frequently used gratitude expressions by Kazakhstani EFL students are expressions of happiness, thankfulness and best wishes in oral speech informal style.