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

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posted on 2023-06-09, 05:01 authored by Lynne MurphyLynne Murphy, Rachele De Felice
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 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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Journal of Politeness Research

ISSN

1612-5681

Publisher

De Gruyter

Issue

1

Volume

15

Page range

1-24

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-02-06

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2019-12-12

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-02-05

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