The use of please in the expression of (im)politeness in the language of London teenagers and adults

Abstract

This paper explores the expression of (im)politeness in the language of teenagers and adults, looking specifically at cases of so-called ‘pragmatic reversal’ (Mazzon, 2017; Fedriani, 2019), in which a politeness marker is used with a confrontational meaning to threaten face. We focus on the use of please, traditionally a courtesy marker, in contexts where it expresses either positive or negative (im)politeness (Culpeper, 2011; Leech, 2014; Aijmer, 2015; Taylor, 2016), drawing on data from the London English Corpus and the spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014. Our analysis of teen talk suggests that please is sometimes used by adolescent speakers when there is a clear mismatch between polite and impolite formulae (e.g., ‘What's that shitty thing please?’). Such processes of pragmatic reversal seem to contribute to harmonious relationships among teenagers, consolidating mutual bonds, which is of key importance during the teen years, in that the discourse of these young speakers is governed by socio-pragmatic norms which differ markedly from those of adults. The paper concludes by noting the significant role of speaker age in the study of (im)politeness, and hence the need to address this issue both in terms of definitions of (im)politeness theory and in the application of these to real data.