The intonation of Please-requests: a corpus-based study [An article from: Journal of Pragmatics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The close association of please with requests has led some to define it as an illocutionary marker rather than as a politeness marker. However, it remains an important feature of politeness in English: its omission in some contexts makes a request less courteous rather than less like a request, so its function must be, at least to some extent, to convey interpersonal, 'attitudinal' meaning. Please occurs mainly in requests, but not all types of request require please. The first part of this study presents corpus evidence for the syntactic and pragmatic and contextual restrictions on please in spoken English. In the second part, basing my observations on the original sound recordings of the corpus data, I describe the intonation patterns of utterances containing, or consisting solely of, please. I relate the observed patterns to the context of situation and show how the intonation may contribute to meaning. The features I describe-syntactic, pragmatic, prosodic and contextual-co-occur in a systematic way, and on this basis I support the view that there is a unifying deontic meaning of please, referring to an agreed set of rights and obligations, but that the focus of a please-request can be both speaker- and hearer-oriented, a distinction that is signalled chiefly in the prosody.