A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF THANKING STRATEGIES IN CAMEROON SOCIAL MEDIA

This study investigates thanking strategies used by Francophone Cameroonian speakers of English (CamFE) on social media platforms, with particular focus on Facebook, Whatsapp and Messenger. Drawing on Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) as its theoretical anchors, the research analyses 122 naturally occurring thanking utterances collected from public social media pages and groups of Cameroonian Francophone speakers of English communities within 2020-2022. The study identifies and categorises the dominant thanking strategies in Cameroonian context which inflects the pragmatics of gratitude online. Findings reveal five major thanking strategies, including explicit expression of gratitude, which is highly used form of thanking strategies with 36.89%. Thanking in response to receiving good wishes follows with 25.41% instances, then compliments response thanking with 19.63%, stating reason with 13.94% and the least among these forms of thanking + intensifiers which is 4.10%. The study contributes to the growing body of research on African digital pragmatics and underscores the importance of contextual factors in shaping online speech acts.