On please within the SAP-model

The lexical item ‘please’ is recognised as the most prominent politeness marker in English, which has led researchers to analyse it from different perspectives. It has been studied in terms of its gram-matical distribution in relation to requests (Bach, 1980; Geukens, 1978; Gordon & Lakoff, 1975;

Sadock, 1974; Searl, 1975; Stubbs, 1983), situational usage (Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2005; Firmin et al., 2004; Gleason et al., 1984; House, 1989; Sifianou, 1999), positional variation of please in re-quests produced by children (Wootton, 1984), and intonation patterns of utterances containing please (Wichmann, 2004). Stubbs (1983:72) speaks of please as purely interaction-driven and thus exclusively occurring in spoken language. Ajimer (1996) claims that please is more common in institutional con-texts, which is supported by the findings of House (1989), Economidou-Kogetsidis (2005), and Sato (2008), who found that please is more readily used in ‘standard situations’ where the speaker and the

addressee behave according to the socio-pragmatic roles set out.

As far as the sentence type that co-occurs with please is concerned, it is most common with imperatives or ‘directives for taking action’ (Sato, 2008; House, 1989; Sadock, 1974) and explicitly marks the utterance as directive, even though it seems to be performing other speech acts (Searle, 1975:68). The overview of the previous research on please mainly suggests that its distribution is mostly

context/culture-based, rather than grammar-based (Geukens, 1978), hence the two most predominant views are either that it can be an addressee-focal politeness marker functioning as a lexical downgrad-er (Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2005; Leech, 1975; Stubbs, 1983; Trosborg, 1995), a request markdowngrad-er (House, 1989; Wichmann, 2004) or a formulaic expression (Gleason et al., 1984) .

To support my case, I would limit myself to the studies of please whose findings are more or less in line with its categorisation within the present analytical framework. One of them is a cor-pus-based study of grammatical distribution of please in American and New Zealand English (Sato, 2008). Sato applied an integrated perspective of sentential grammar and interactional discourse in order to investigate the degree of politeness expressed by please in relation to its positional variations within turn-constructional units (TCU). Sato’s findings are interesting to us in several ways. First of all, she argues that the core properties of please in terms of both politeness and directive nature can be explained principally by its position in a sentence, i.e. TCU-initial/-medial/-final position. Examining a total of 200 tokens of please found in American and New Zealand spoken English, she found that the most frequent sentence type for both varieties of English is the imperative, which confirms the previous studies (see above). The directive force of please becomes strongest in the TCU-initial posi-tion, where the speaker’s ‘assertive attitude and emotional involvement’ is evident (Sato, 2008:1272).

Interestingly, Sato’s data analysis did not reveal any instances of please as the addressee-focal politeness marker in TCU-initial position. On the contrary, all TCU-initial instances exhibit ‘self-directed’ lin-guistic behaviour on the part of the speaker (Sato, 2008:1275) and are usually related to the speaker’s immediate interactional goal of completing the activity, which may not necessarily be beneficial to the hearer. According to Sato,

The speaker’s limited interest in engaging in facework is subject to the recipi-ent’s evaluation, which can be oriented toward positive and negative ends of social import. Various assessments can be borne out such as ‘expressive’ and

‘enthusiastic’ on the one hand, and ‘insistent’ and ‘aggressive’ on the other. The results suggest that regardless of the nature of the interpretation, the core task of TCU-initial please is to mark the speaker’s firm disposition, where the polite-ness effects tend to be largely manipulated. (ibid.; my italics)

The fact that with utterance-initial please the speaker adheres to claiming her face needs in either an ‘expressive’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘insistent’, or ‘aggressive’ manner correlates pretty well with the semantic properties of please advocated in our framework. Namely, when please appears in prior-imperative position without intonation break between ‘please’ and the following utterance, it is categorised under Symptom as speaker’s acceptance/non-acceptance (see section 3.5.5.1.1).

Furthermore, the semantic properties of TCU-final please differ from those of TCU-initial please by referring to a set of conventionalised social rules rather than expressing the speaker’s feelings or emotions. As Sato (2008) explains, instead of making strong self-claims, the speaker chooses to appeal to the hearer’s social-self, so to speak, and the use of please ‘is prescribed by socially conventionalised use and the presence of please is acknowledged as the social protocol by all participants’ (ibid., 1267).

In a number of examples Sato (ibid., 1266-1269) further demonstrates her point in ascribing a strong

‘persuasive’ element to utterance-final instances of the token. In my view, the reference to tacit social rules, which in Sato’s terms is as persuasive a strategy as explicit demands (ibid., 1273), renders a deon-tic meaning of please and, as a result, corresponds to the persuasive function of the ‘obedience condi-tions’, i.e. speaker’s post-conditions to the hearer, which mainly inform the hearer of the consequences in case she either accepts or refuses to accept the speaker’s ‘contract’ (see section 3.5.5.3.1.1). Besides, there is a striking resemblance between the ‘contract-based’ (according to Fraser’s (1990) conversation-al-contract view) type of politeness associated with final please and Durst-Andersen’s (2007) idea of any requesting activity as being essentially about satisfying the conditions of both parties (i.e. speaker and hearer) when they negotiate a ‘contract’.

Wichmann’s corpus-based study (2004) of the intonation patterns of utterances containing please is notable in at least two respects. First, Wichmann found that the intonation contours of please-utterances correlate in relatively straightforward way with their context of situation, in casu ‘pri-vate’ or ‘public’ domains (after Brown & Levinson, 1987). While ‘pri‘pri-vate’ speech primarily occurred with a request ending high (high terminal), ‘public’ speech mostly co-occurred with a final falling contour (low terminal). Wichmann explains the systematic co-occurrence of the high terminal and please-utterances in ‘private’ situations by such notions as ‘openness for negotiation’ or ‘openness for non-compliance’ (ibid., 1545; (Brown, Currie & Kenworthy, 1980; Cruttenden, 1997; Wichmann, 2000) In other words, private speech situations presuppose a more or less symmetrical power relation-ship between the interlocutors and the hearer’s right to refuse to comply with the request by virtue of the minimal imposition. Conversely, ‘public’ please-utterances ending low are considered as ‘non-ne-gotiable’ (Wichmann, 2004:1545; Croft, 1995), because of the larger social distance and asymmetrical

power relationships involved.

Second, Wichmann (2004:1547) reconceptualises the literal meaning of please as being ‘a cour-tesy formula which acknowledges debt with greater or lesser sense of obligation’. In this respect, the intonation specifies the degree of obligation as well as the ‘hearer-based’ or ‘speaker-based’ occurrence of please:

In my view, a more unifying explanation for both the absence of please in very indirect requests, and its presence in transparent requests, is to see it as a gesture of courtesy that contextualises the accompanying request as occurring within a known set of rights and obligations. It indicates that this is a li-censed, and therefore appropriate, request and that the speaker acknowledges the debt. In some cases, this is consistent with the notion of please as a request

‘propitiator’ (Biber et al., 1999: 1093), where the word please is an appeal to the hearer to find the request acceptable and to comply. In other cases it may be a signal that the speaker believes the request is legitimate and assumes com-pliance. Both the hearer-oriented appeal and the speaker-oriented expression of belief would constitute legitimate felicity conditions for a request. (ibid., 1546)

The results of her study suggest that the hearer-oriented please is associated with ‘private’ speech, rising end tone, and seeking cooperation, on the one hand, and the speaker-oriented please is represen-tative of a ‘public’ speech, falling intonation, non-negotiable compliance, on the other. Interestingly, Wichmann supports her arguments by referring to the book by Ulrich Busses and providing the

dia-chronic evidence in the form of the two early polite formulae, as found in Shakespeare: I pray you/ pray/

prithee and if you please, if it please you. While the former expressions normally prefaced commands and

‘put the focus on the speaker and assert[ing] his/her sincerity: speaker sincerely wants X to be done’, the latter ‘ask for the willingness of the listener to do X’ (ibid., 1546-1547).

Although in the pragmatic wheel the categories within Symptom (speaker’s acceptance), Signal (speaker’s acceptance) and Model (obedience conditions) are construed otherwise, there are unquestion-ably clear parallels between them and Wichmann’s speaker- and hearer-oriented meaning of please. The speaker-oriented interpretation of please resembles both speaker’s acceptance (i.e. ‘S accepts that there is a problem and wants to solve it’) and obedience conditions (i.e. ‘S informs H of the consequences of H’s complying or not complying with the request’). Wichmann’s hearer-oriented reading of please, on the other hand, can be paraphrased as ‘S wants H to be cooperative’. Irrespective of these differences in interpretation, Wichmann’s findings seem to provide solid proof for the categorisation of the token

please within the present theoretical framework.