Performative verbs in requests: evidence from eighteenth-century letters

In the second half of the eighteenth century the courtesy marker pray was the default pragmatic marker used in polite requests while the new form please started to emerge. Pray was a grammaticalized form originated in the longer performative expression I pray you/thee, whereas the verb please had a different syntactic pattern. In the same period there were other performative expressions, particularly common in the epistolary genre, with the same syntactic pattern observed in (I) pray (you) and also used in directives. They resorted to the wide variety of requestive verbs available in Late Modern English, such as beg, beseech, desire, entreat, and request. This paper examines the set of different performative expressions used as polite request markers in the Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (1761-1790) in order to provide an account of their productivity and functions in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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