Abstract:

As an important daily word to express requests and politeness, please is often ignored or improperly used by Chinese students due to cultural differences. Based on the idea that the actual use of please by native speakers should be taken as a reference in second language pedagogy, this study analyses data from the Spoken BNC2014. By statistical means including log-likelihood, Spearman correlation and logistic regression, this study explores the effects of gender, age and social class on the frequency of please usage, as well as British English speakers’ choice of sentence type and intra-sentence position. Results show that, intralinguistically, interrogative sentences tend to be paired with sentence-final please; while extralinguistically, females use please more frequently, while males tend to use please in the initial position of imperative sentences; teenagers use please most frequently and prefer to apply interrogative sentences; middle-class speakers use please more frequently than other classes. This study further elicits native English speakers’ choices of please sentential position and sentence type in real life, and proposes a teaching scheme of please explicit and implicit instruction, which shows significance in Chinese students’ pragmatic competence improvement in terms of English request.

Key words: please, request speech act, pragmatic failure, BNC, English pedagogy