Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please

Murphy, M. Lynne and De Felice, Rachele (2019). Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please. Journal of Politeness Research, 15(1) pp. 77–100.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2016-0027

Abstract

This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analyzed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and modal verb type. Differences in use of please between the two varieties of English can be accounted for by viewing this as a marker of conventional politeness rather than face-threat mitigation in British English and as a marker of relationship asymmetry in American English.

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About

• Item ORO ID
• 85697
• Item Type
• Journal Item
• ISSN
• 1613-4877
• Keywords
• politeness strategies; requests; pragmatic variation; English; please
• Academic Unit or School
• Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS)
• Research Group
• Applied Linguistics and Literacies Research Group
• Copyright Holders
• © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH
• Depositing User
• Rachele De Felice