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Abstract

This study examines thanking strategies across three relational scenarios and four dyadic gender configurations among 120 university-educated urban Saudi colloquial Arabic speakers aged 20-40 from Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam. A scenario-based discourse completion task (DCT) yielded 720 responses comprising 1,843 strategy tokens; these data were supplemented by interviews with 30 participants. The intimate, acquaintance, and stranger scenarios differed in favor type and imposition, representing distinct relational-situational contexts. The DCT elicited contextually appropriate responses; accordingly, the findings are interpreted as reflecting participants' sociopragmatic preferences rather than naturally occurring interactional behavior. Expressing Benediction (30.1%) and Thanking (25.7%) were the two most frequent strategies. Across the intimate, acquaintance, and stranger scenarios, Expressing Benediction accounted for 23.7%, 30.9%, and 36.0% of strategy tokens, respectively, whereas Expressing Intimacy accounted for 21.7%, 8.7%, and 6.4%. Within this sample, female-to-female dyads produced the highest mean number of strategy units per response, male-to-male dyads the lowest, with cross-gender dyads occupying intermediate positions. Interview participants linked these patterns to religious obligation, relational solidarity, and gendered propriety. Within this interpretive framework, ``divine reciprocity'' captures a recurring rationale in participants' accounts whereby benedictive expressions invoke Allah as the ultimate source of recompense when direct repayment is unavailable or considered insufficient. The study contributes to Arabic pragmatics by offering a relational account of gratitude that integrates relational scenarios and dyadic gender configurations in an urban Saudi colloquial Arabic context.

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