Courtesy markers in requests: The case of pray and please in Late Modern English

Abstract

This PhD dissertation focuses on the study of the two main courtesy markers in requests in the Late Modern English period, namely please and pray. Both of them are borrowings from French and came to replace native strategies (e.g. the Old English parenthetical ic bidde) in this pragmatic function. Pray had been the major courtesy marker in requests since the Early Modern English period, but it started to fall into disuse during the Late Modern English period, when a new form, please, started to gain ground. A preliminary analysis of the pragmatic markers please and pray in the multigenre corpus ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers) showed that these features are only available in fiction, drama and letters. Following these results, I proceeded to the analysis of several single-genre corpora. As regards fiction, I resorted to a selection from Chadwyck Healey’s Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1700-1780) and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1782-1903). For drama I used the drama section in A Corpus of Irish English. Finally, I paid attention to correspondence, and studied two epistolary corpora covering different periods within Late Modern English (the Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (1761-1790) and A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (1860-1919)) and a selection of letter-writing manuals extracted from ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) database. My study relies on corpus linguistics methodology, and gets insights from Historical Pragmatics, Politeness Theory and Speech-Act Theory, while the origin and development of the courtesy marker please is accounted for in terms of grammaticalisation. The thesis includes a revision of the literature on the different theoretical approaches and provides the accounts and descriptions of these two courtesy markers in the literature, both for Present-day English and for earlier periods. I also looked at Late Modern English reference works in order to gain insight as to how the speech act of requests was apprehended in the period. In my corpus analysis I explore the different sources which have been proposed in the literature as the origin of the courtesy marker please. In addition to conditional structures of the type if you please, in my study I draw special attention to imperative structures such as be pleased to, and please to, which constitute in my opinion the major source of the Present-day courtesy marker please. The process of grammaticalisation of please from these imperative structures would be as follows: Be pleased to > please to > please (verb) > please (courtesy marker). Thus, the courtesy marker please would have originated in a full matrix clause rather than in an already parenthetical conditional form. The grammaticalisation of please follows similar patterns to those identified in the development of other pragmatic markers, not only in English, but also cross-linguistically.