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Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 05:01 authored by M. Lynne MurphyM. Lynne Murphy, Rachele De FeliceThis 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 analysed 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 of relationship asymmetry in American English.
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Publication status
- Published
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- Accepted version
Journal
Journal of Politeness ResearchISSN
1612-5681Publisher
De GruyterExternal DOI
Issue
1Volume
15Page range
1-24Department affiliated with
- English Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2017-02-06First Open Access (FOA) Date
2019-12-12First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2017-02-05Usage metrics
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