Courtesy markers in requeststhe case of pray and please in late modern english

Resumo

This PhD dissertation focuses on the study of main courtesy markers in requests during the Late Modern English period. At the beginning of this period (the early eighteenth century) pray, a form of French origin, was the preferred courtesy marker in requests. Pray came to replace the pragmatic function of a native construction, the parenthetical ic bidde. During the Late Modern English period pray started to fall in disuse, while the new form please was gaining ground with the same function. Please was also a form introduced in English from French (cf. OED s.v. please v.), and, in fact, Present-day French main request marker, the conditional construction sil vous plaît, still retains a cognate of please. A corpus analysis in ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers) reveals that fiction, drama and letters are the only genres in which the pragmatic markers please and pray can be found. Following the results in ARCHER, several corpora are considered for deeper analysis. As regards fiction, two Chadwyck Healey databases provide the necessary data, namely Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1700-1780) and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1782-1903). The drama section in A Corpus of Irish English is the selected corpus for the study of this genre. Finally, two epistolary corpora are analysed in order to cover different periods within Late Modern English, namely the Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (1761-1790) and A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (1860-1919). A selection of letter-writing manuals extracted from ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) database provides deeper knowledge on this genre in the eighteenth century. Apart from corpus linguistics methodology, different theoretical frameworks are used in the present study. Thus, within the area of pragmatics Historical Pragmatics, Politeness Theory and Speech-act Theory deserve special attention. Some processes of language change are also useful to explain the shift from pray to please. Thus, origins and developments of these two pragmatic markers can be accounted for in terms of grammaticalisation. The thesis includes an updated revision of the literature on the different theoretical approaches and methodology included. It also accounts for the descriptions of pray and please, covering not only a Present-day English perspective, but providing also a diachronic portrayal as found in the literature. Late Modern English reference works have also been checked in order to gain insights of how speakers understood the main courtesy markers in requests in their different periods. Different reasons for the replacement are taken into account, including not only linguistic evidence, such as phonetics, semantics and pragmatics, but socio-political aspects are also contemplated as factors behind the shift from pray to please. Different hypothesis for the origin of please are explored. Whereas in the literature the most favoured origin regards the conditional structure if you please as the ultimate source, several data analyses in the present study point at an imperative structure as the form which would give rise to Present-day English most common politeness word. The process of grammaticalisation of please would include the following steps: Be pleased to > please to > please (verb) > please (courtesy marker). Thus, it 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.