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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2023
Edited by Sterre Leufkens and Marco Bril
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 40] 2023
► pp. 178–193

Beyond politeness

A corpus study of Spanish por favor

| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Radboud University Nijmegen

Here we investigate the use of the politeness marker por favor ‘please’ in a corpus of contemporary Spanish dialogues from film scripts and literary dialogues. We argue that por favor is in fact only occasionally used as an expression of politeness. Apart from these uses, we distinguish between cases where por favor functions as a marker of illocutionary force and other discourse functions, that include the expression of impatience and disapproval. While the formulaic use of por favor is mainly limited to routine situations in the public sphere, the other functions are typical of private conversations. We argue that the ancient use of the expression can account for its contemporary non-polite uses.

Keywords: please, pragmatics, directive speech acts, requests, dialogues
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Studies on por favor
  • 3.Corpus studies on please
  • 4.A corpus-based study of por favor
    • 4.1Sentence type
    • 4.2Position of PF
    • 4.3Directives
    • 4.4Adjacency pairs
    • 4.5Speech situation and relation between interlocutors
    • 4.6Power and pronouns of address
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 3 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00086.mul
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