Beyond politeness

Abstract

Abstract 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.