Thank you, sorry and please: English politeness markers in Polish
Thank you, sorry and please: English politeness markers in Polish

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this study is to analyse the use of the English politeness markers thank you, sorry andplease in Polish.My initial hypothesis was that the politeness markers have already been incorporated intothe mental lexicon of Polish speakers, and are thus understood and accepted by them, but they do not havethe prospect of replacing their Polish equivalents because they lack the necessary pragmatic force. Previousstudies (Terkourafi 2011; Peterson &Vaattovaara 2014) show that pragmatic borrowings are unlikely todo so. However, this corpus study finds a context in which a borrowing is used increasingly, namely sorryin the collocation with ale (ʻbutʼ). It seems to have started replacing its Polish equivalents in this context,as it constitutes 25% of all collocations of apologetic behaviour with ale in the National Corpus of Polish.However, the majority of the occurrences of the analysed politeness markers in the corpus are restrictedto Internet-mediated communication.

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