The prosody of Please-requests: a corpus based approach

Not a great deal is known about please, other than that it is syntactically unique, it is used to express politeness, and occurs most commonly with requests. The close association with requests has led some to define it as an illocutionary marker rather than as a politeness marker. However, since its omission makes a request less courteous rather than less like a request, its function is, at least to some extent, to convey interpersonal, ‘attitudinal’ meaning and not only to act as a discourse marker. Please occurs mainly in requests, but not all types of request require please. The first purpose of this study is to present corpus evidence for the syntactic and pragmatic restrictions on please in spoken English, and the distribution of please-requests in relation to the context of situation in which they occur. Secondly I shall examine the prosody of please-requests and its contribution to meaning. Prosodic realisation is the aspect of spoken please-requests that has been least systematically studied in the past, and yet all speech is uttered with prosody and it is an intrinsic part of the utterance. An important component of prosody is intonation, and since intonation is known to contribute to interpersonal meaning in interaction, this is focused on in the second section. Using the original sound recordings of the data, I describe the intonation patterns of requests containing please, and again relate the observed patterns to the context of situation. The features I describe syntactic, pragmatic, prosodic and contextual – co-occur in a systematic way, and on this basis I propose that there is a unifying deontic meaning of please, referring to an agreed set of rights and obligations, but that the focus of a pleaserequest can be both speaker and hearer-oriented, a distinction that is signalled chiefly in the prosody.