Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.
A. unwritten B. respectively C. staged D. expressions E. appreciation
F. instances G. responded H. unlike I. constructed J. initially K. frequency |
Say Thank-You
To better understand how people express gratitude in normal life, anthropologist Simeon Floyd, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and his colleagues 【小题1】 a large, cross-cultural study covering five continents and eight languages. They included English, Italian, Polish, Russian and Lao, as well as 【小题2】 languages such as Cha’ palaa, spoken in Ecuador, Murrinh-Patha, spoken in northern Australia, and Siwu, spoken in Ghana. Both verbal and non-verbal expressions of gratitude, such as a smile or a nod, were regarded as interactions.
Floyd’s team left cameras in household and community settings and captured more than 1,500 【小题3】 of social interactions in which one person asked for something and another 【小题4】.
They found that in every culture, people fulfilled requests, but expressions of gratitude, such as saying “thanks” or nodding in 【小题5】, were remarkably rare, occurring just 5.5 percent of the time.
English and Italian speakers had slightly higher rates of gratitude expression—14.5 percent and 13.5 percent of the time, 【小题6】, but still surprisingly low considering how polite Western people think they are, says Floyd. “English speakers are not so 【小题7】 other people, and often prefer not to express gratitude in informal contexts,” he says.
Cha’ palaa speakers had the lowest 【小题8】 of expressed gratitude, with zero examples in 96 recorded interactions. But this starts to make sense when you learn that the language has no easy way to say “thank you”.
Also surprised by the findings was David Peterson, a linguist (语言学家) who developed the 【小题9】 language Dothraki for the TV show Game of Thrones. It too, has no word for thank you, something Peterson 【小题10】 considered to be unlikely. “I thought that you had to have a word to express gratitude,” he says.
